UNC basketball’s stunning, season-ending loss is befitting of the cruelty of March

There is a crushing finality to the end of an NCAA Tournament run, whether it lasts one game or five, that is difficult to describe unless it’s witnessed live and in person, from inside the kind of quiet and somber locker room where North Carolina grieved here late Thursday night. The Tar Heels had just experienced an ending as sudden and cruel as there can be in sports.

The end of a game and of a season. The end of a team. The end of a long and heralded college career, in the case of Armando Bacot. The end, most of all, of all those hopes and dreams that fueled Bacot and his teammates for as long as they’ve been together, united toward a goal they believed not only possible but maybe probable, if they played their best.

UNC did not play at its best during an 89-87 defeat against Alabama during an NCAA Tournament West Regional semifinal. UNC (29-8), it could be argued, did not come close to playing its best. There was the woeful 25% shooting performance in the second half; the uncharacteristic off night from RJ Davis, the ACC Player of the Year who has usually been brilliant.

There were the late-game breakdowns in execution — UNC failing to get much of a shot off in the final moments, when it still had a chance. There was the Tar Heels’ inability to hold on to second-half leads of eight (just after halftime) and six (with eight and a half minutes remaining) and three (with 92 seconds left). There were a lot of other things that will undoubtedly linger.

And then there was the crushing, cruel finality. Just a day earlier there’d been so much joy inside UNC’s locker room. There’d been games among players and managers; light banter and joke-cracking representative of a team that’d grown close; the talk of the future, both the more immediate and that of the long term. And a little more than 24 hours later it was all over.

A game, a season, and one team’s journey.

The locker room became not a place of joy or bonding but of mourning. Just a day earlier the Tar Heels had been almost enamored with the setting, given the locker room they used here is the same one the Los Angeles Lakers always use. UNC players basked in knowing they were sharing the same space as LeBron James; walking on the same carpet through the same hall.

And then it looked like this on Thursday, after a season had ended: Cormac Ryan, soaking his battered feet in a tub of ice, with a blank and unwavering stare; Davis, barely able to lift his head up toward the questions he received, a towel covering his head; Seth Trimble, trying to hold in tears that defied his efforts. Trimble perhaps summed things up in the most poignant way.

“Of course, everybody was ready for last year to be done,” he said, looking back toward the misery that defined the 2023 Tar Heels, and offered redemptive fuel for this year’s version. “(And) nobody wanted this year to end. So that says a lot.”

For long stretches, it didn’t seem like it would end. At least not here and not on this night.

At halftime it felt like UNC was in control, with a 54-46 lead and with the Tar Heels thriving amid a pace without limits. And throughout the second half, with the shots not falling and with Davis, especially, suffering through a performance he’ll see in his nightmares, it still felt like UNC would somehow find a way. It felt that way right up until the Tar Heels ran out of chances.

It took some strange happenings, typical of March and this tournament if atypical of this particular UNC team. It took Alabama, the tournament’s worst remaining defensive team, discovering its defense and out-maneuvering the Tar Heels, both in scheme and execution.

It took random, unlikely mishaps — like Bacot missing a dunk with UNC clinging to a three-point lead with a little less than seven minutes remaining. It took Grant Nelson, Alabama’s mustachioed 6-11 senior forward, turning in all-time performance with 24 points and 12 rebounds — and with 12 of those points coming during the final five minutes. It took the Tar Heels falling apart, at times, during that same span; a confluence of miscues on both sides that left them one score short.

“A play here or there,” said Hubert Davis, whose third season as UNC’s coach ended with an ACC regular season championship but without the deep March run his team so desperately sought. “I’ve talked all season about the little details that make big things happen.

“Not just necessarily shots (but) rebounds, free throws, loose balls.”

To Davis it wasn’t particularly complicated: “They made, down the stretch, more plays than us.”

It was a defeat, for UNC, that will undoubtedly be analyzed and over-analyzed in the days and weeks and months to come. It was a defeat that might well haunt RJ Davis, who has been so good throughout his senior season but who found so little room or success against Alabama guard Rylan Griffen, who hounded Davis into his worst shooting performance of the season.

“I just wasn’t good enough,” Davis said quietly in the locker room, after he — like Arizona’s Caleb Love before him — missed all nine of his 3-point attempts. It was the first time this season Davis failed to make at least one 3-pointer, and it came in a two-point loss.

“I didn’t make enough shots,” he said. “Came up short. So I could have done better, and it hurts. Because I know this won’t be the same group. And you’re not going to get this type of group back again.”

Indeed, this was a rare kind of team — unlike any in UNC history yet reflective of the transient nature of college basketball these days. Davis and Bacot returned, along with Trimble, from last season. Seven newcomers, including five transfers, joined them. It clicked, and in a way that is becoming increasingly rare in a sport defined by constant movement and roster turnover.

It was one of those newcomers, Ryan, who spoke up during UNC’s press conference and defended RJ Davis after he’d received a question about what went wrong. In that moment, Ryan said, “I’ve got to chime in here,” and then: “For anybody to come and say anything negative about RJ is unacceptable, and I’m just going to say that.”

It was another one of those newcomers, Harrison Ingram, who said on Thursday that he figured he’d be talking with this group of teammates for decades to come, and staying close, because the bond they shared grew that strong.

“I’ve never had a team where I’m just that close with everybody,” he said.

This was always a team, though, that belonged to Bacot and RJ Davis; to the two guys who’d been around the longest and experienced the most. They both played under former UNC coach Roy Williams. They both played through a pandemic — with Bacot playing in the final ACC Tournament game of 2020, before its cancelation.

They played key roles in that magical run in March and early April of 2022, and then experienced the pain of last season. And then this, their final year together. Bacot set records for rebounds and double-doubles and came to play in more games than anyone in ACC history. Davis became a consensus All-American and guaranteed his No. 4 will be honored in the Smith Center rafters.

Photos: North Carolina basketball falls to Alabama in the NCAA Sweet 16

They walked off the court together. They walked toward UNC’s postgame press conference together. They shared the same kind of sentiments, on opposite sides of the locker room, Davis with the towel covering his head; Bacot still wearing an expression of shock, as if he hadn’t yet registered the finality of it all.

Still, Bacot said, “I think this year for me was the funnest year of basketball I’ve had in my life.”

Said Davis, of Bacot: “He was the heart and soul of this team.”

Now come all the questions: Might Davis, who has a season of eligibility remaining, come back for a fifth year? And what of Ingram? How many players can Hubert Davis keep? How can his next team, whatever the composition, carry on the culture and cohesion that defined this one?

Late Thursday night, though, and already well into Friday back on the East Coast, there was only a sense of finality. The Tar Heels had plans to stay here through the weekend. They envisioned dispatching Alabama and then whomever awaited Saturday — it happened to be Clemson — and then to go onto Phoenix, and to the Final Four. That was the dream, in this city of dreams.

Now with a suddenness it was over. There was nothing to do but pack and go home. It was hardly the first time a dream had died in this city; that a Hollywood ending proved elusive in real life — that a bunch of hopefuls had to watch someone else take their place and celebrate while they did it. UNC has been on the other side of it many times. This time, the cruel finality proved inescapable.