One for the road: In final ACC Tournament as we know it, a classic NC State-UNC final

It was almost midnight, Friday night turning into Saturday morning, when Michael O’Connell made his way from the court to the hallway near the N.C. State locker room, where his teammates had been waiting to mob him. O’Connell had been the last one to make it there, delayed with a television interview after he made the shot of all shots at the end of regulation against Virginia.

The shot will undoubtedly be replayed from now until forever. And whatever the opposite of so-called N.C. State ... “Stuff” — that of curses and hexes and jinxes, and more than three decades of terrible luck in the sport it helped establish in North Carolina — O’Connell’s shot was the opposite.

It was, for the Wolfpack, something of a miracle.

A desperation heave, from the left wing, that hit high off the backboard, circled the rim at least two and a half times and then fell. After that, overtime seemed but a formality. Virginia took an early lead there, yes, but the Wolfpack scored the final nine points during its 73-65 victory, and so began what had to be one of the more memorable celebrations after any ACC Tournament semifinal.

Indeed, O’Connell’s teammates mobbed him when he arrived. They danced. They lifted K.J. Keatts, the walk-on son of head coach Kevin, and escorted him a little ways down the hall, Superman style, where he placed the Wolfpack logo sticker into the championship game on the large tournament bracket hanging on the wall.

More dancing. Some chanting. Some singing, almost, as the team yelled, in unison:

“Wooooolf — Paaaaaack ... Wooooolf — Paaaaaack.”

It was a delirious scene after a delirious finish, and then here was Kevin Keatts, during his postgame press conference, letting loose a bit: “Everybody expected this to be Carolina and Duke,” he said. “Well, it’s Carolina and N.C. State.”

An apropos ACC finale

And how fitting, in a way. How fitting that here at the last ACC Tournament of its kind — the final one before the conference goes coast-to-coast for the sole purpose and pursuit of chasing football television money — the championship game features Carolina and State.

The two schools most responsible, decades ago, for the ACC’s rise as a basketball power. The two schools whose bitter rivalry made college basketball not just a pastime throughout North Carolina, but something more like a religion.

As Keatts said, everybody did indeed expect another iteration of UNC and Duke on championship Saturday. And that would’ve been fitting and fun, too, for all the obvious reasons. But there’s something about Carolina and State, who will be meeting in the championship game for the seventh time.

The storylines are richer. The mutual disdain more intense.

The UNC-Duke rivalry is one built, in a lot of ways, on shared respect and admiration — or at least that was long the case during the years of Dean Smith and Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams. There is some hatred there, among fans, but the people involved with both programs understand they’ve helped make each other what they are.

Meanwhile, there is hardly any respect or admiration between State and Carolina. The Tar Heels have separated themselves so much in men’s basketball over the past three-plus decades that what they share with the Wolfpack now strains the definition of rivalry. Yet while the on-court competitiveness has dwindled — UNC is 56-16 against State since Jim Valvano’s final season there — the bitterness has arguably increased.

State fans have long yearned for the Wolfpack to become what it once was. Carolina fans have taken glee in the Wolfpack’s long-simmering basketball misery. Anyone who’s about 30 or younger has never known anything but that reality. Which brings us to Saturday night at Capital One Arena.

Will the magic continue?

There is no reason, given the events of the past 30 or so years, to expect State to have much of a chance. This is a program that hasn’t won the ACC Tournament since 1987. One that hasn’t often competed with its fiercest rival. One that lost against Carolina, after similarly-hopeful Cinderella runs to the tournament championship game, in 1997 and 2007.

There’s many years here of bad mojo and heartbreak.

But then, also, there’s this week. Waking up just in time to turn it on against Louisville in a mostly-empty arena on Tuesday afternoon. Beating Syracuse on Wednesday, with little trouble. Surviving the drama and stress and “oh-no-here-we-go-again” feeling in the final minute against Duke on Thursday night. And then this, on Friday.

Virginia’s meltdown. The Cavaliers’ inexplicable failure to foul late in regulation.

The O’Connell shot, which went up, up, up and off the glass and round and round and round.

And in.

More than one of his teammates said they felt like they were living in a movie.

And now State confronts its ultimate villain.

Will UNC find redemption?

It’s not like the storylines are lacking on the other side, either. Carolina has been on a season-long quest for redemption after all that transpired a season ago. Armando Bacot and RJ Davis are on their last ride together, and they combined to score the Tar Heels’ final 18 points in their 72-65 victory against Pittsburgh in the earlier semifinal Friday night.

It was a game that felt more like a street fight or a brawl; the kind that, in the past, UNC might’ve been too soft to win. But that was then and this is now, and now Hubert Davis, the third-year head coach, has inspired a fight and a will in his players that has fueled them. There are many banners hanging up in the rafters of their home arena. They aspire to hang more.

Those are the stakes on Saturday night.

State has a chance to do what no N.C. State team has done in 37 years. Carolina has a chance to win the ACC Tournament for the first time since 2016 — something of a drought, itself, for that program — in the process again rip the heart out of its oldest rival. Yet this feels even bigger than those stakes suggest, because of the state of the ACC and what was once its marquee event.

For a long time, this conference tournament was one-of-a-kind. It was among the toughest tickets in sports. It was part family reunion, part competition of the highest order. It mattered in a way it hasn’t, for a good while now, and in a way it won’t ever again. But this, on Saturday night, feels like old times. The ACC, what with the impending additions of Cal and Stanford and SMU, continues to move farther away from what made it special in the first place. It continues to chase growth for growth’s sake, and in the process it’s becoming something that’s difficult to recognize.

Next year, maybe we’ll get an SMU-Boston College on a Wednesday in Charlotte, or how about Cal and Stanford on a Tuesday? Nothing says ACC Tournament like that. But now we have a championship game worthy of the tradition of the league. It’s State-Carolina, one more time for the ACC as we’ve known it; one more time for this tournament, the last of its kind.