Heels return home as redeemed heroes
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — North Carolina’s men’s basketball team dedicated the past year to redeeming itself for 4.7 agonizing seconds.
Now these Tar Heels will hang another banner from the Smith Center rafters.
Or the ceiling. But probably not the roof.
No longer haunted by the memory of a buzzer-beating loss in last year’s title game, but galvanized by a misstatement from their most decorated former player, the Tar Heels returned home Tuesday with their sixth NCAA tournament trophy, which they earned a night earlier by beating Gonzaga 71-65 in the championship game.
“This year,” senior Isaiah Hicks said, “we did it.”
Thousands of fans poured into the arena and onto the court before the team’s flight had even landed at nearby RaleighDurham International Airport, and they cheered fanatically every time live footage of the team’s motorcade was shown on the video scoreboards.
When the individual players were introduced, they showered Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year Justin Jackson with chants of “one more year.”
“It just didn’t seem like we were going to get back to where we wanted to be, and you all did a great job,” said guard Joel Berry II, still wearing the net from the title game around his neck. “We just basically did our thing, and we came back home with it.”
This was the first time the team and its fans were together inside the Smith Center since a victory over Duke in the regular-season finale exactly one month earlier — a night made memorable by Michael Jordan’s surprise appearance at halftime to announce a partnership between the athletic department and his Nike line. During his remarks to the crowd, he said of the football program: “The ceiling is the roof.”
Just as quickly as it went viral, the basketball team adopted it as its rallying cry for the postseason. Hall of Fame coach Roy Williams said he received a text from Jordan congratulating him because he “raised the ceiling to the roof.”
And during another memorable snapshot from the celebration, the in-house cameras turned toward the six banners hanging from the arena’s rafters while athletic director Bubba Cunningham repeated Jordan’s malapropism.
The Tar Heels (33-7) climbed as high as No. 3 in The AP Top 25 and were sixth in the final media poll, won the Atlantic Coast Conference’s regular-season title by two games and earned No. 1 seeds in both the conference and NCAA tournaments.
They won their last five NCAA Tournament games by an average of 5.6 points, earning a one-point victory over Oregon in the Final Four before pulling away to beat Gonzaga and claim their latest championship.
As this past season began, they couldn’t escape the highlights from the 2016 championship game, when Marcus Paige seemingly sent the title game to overtime with an acrobatic jumper with 4.7 seconds left — except Kris Jenkins then beat the buzzer with a dagger of a 3-pointer that gave Villanova the title.
The season-long vow was to get back to the title game and not let it slip away this time. They kept that wound fresh all year: Jackson gave the team’s text-messaging group a name: “Redemption.”
By Tuesday morning, according to a screenshot posted on Twitter by guard Nate Britt, the group had a new name.: “Redeemed.”
Good numbers
NEW YORK — Viewership for Monday night’s NCAA title game was up 30 percent from last year.
According to figures released Tuesday by the Nielsen Co., the CBS broadcast was watched by an average of 22.998 million viewers, peaking at 26.105 million viewers from 11:15 to 11:30 p.m. EDT. A record 4.4 million live video streams were also viewed, according to Nielsen.
Although Monday night’s game was often slow-paced and filled with fouls, it wasn’t decided until the final minutes. The viewing numbers may also have been helped by the memory of the 2016 title game, when Villanova’s Kris Jenkins hit a buzzer-beating shot to top North Carolina.
Overall, this year’s NCAA tournament — broadcast by CBS and Turner Sports — was the second-most watched NCAA tournament in 23 years by averaging 10.827 million viewers (up 16 percent from last year), according to Nielsen.