Filed under: North Carolina
It was a smile more than a year in the making.
After three hundred sixty eight days, 40 minutes of impassioned sideline calisthenics, and a tense, oh, second-and-a-half while a Kentucky buzzer beater rose and fell, North Carolina coach Roy Williams finally flashed a smile that stretched from one end of the Dean E. Smith Center to the other.
Twelve months and three days after the Tar Heels last won a true statement game, North Carolina had once again beaten a top-10 team.
It was déjà blue at last.
From Williams to the stoic and scrutinized freshman Harrison Barnes, to Dexter Strickland, who scored the game's final point at the free throw line and star Tyler Zeller, who beamed - and bled for the chin - North Carolina just smiled and smiled and smiled.
"I'm ecstatic with the win," Williams said.
"The scene in our locker room when I got in there was a very fun time. That's the kind of thing you coach for.
If the celebration seemed a bit extreme, a little un-Carolina-ish for a program where wins like these were as much a part of December as Christmas shopping and awkward family photos, well,the Tar Heels haven't much felt like themselves in recent months either. Since that Dec. 1 win over Michigan State in 2009, North Carolina finished the regular season at 16-16 with a rock-bottom ending - a 32-point rout by Duke in the ACC finale. And when March went Mad, North Carolina went to the NIT.
They didn't win that, either.
Even joyous occasions - like when North Carolina beat Miami in February to become just the second program to hit the 2,000 win mark - felt overshadowed and disappointing.
So, for a coach who's watched his players make the sort of decisions that would've forced Job himself to crack a clipboard in half and for a team that's spent more time answering what went wrong than BP executives, it was reason to celebrate.
Heel yes.
"It ... gives us the confidence that we can beat that caliber of team, and we are that caliber of a team," Zeller explained.
After all, North Carolina won by being tougher than Kentucky, more poised than Kentucky, which was something long absent from the Tar Heel playbook.
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Source: http://ncaabasketball.fanhouse.com/2010/12/04/tar-heels-have-reason-to-smile-for-now/
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