By Chuck Culpepper, The Washington Post
GLENDALE, Ariz. – It was the Monday night on which Mr. Roy Allen Williams of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the coach of 992 games to that point, and 94 NCAA tournament games, and a whopping 12 Final Four games, and hundreds upon hundreds of postgame talks, headed for the last locker room, tried to think of something to say to his players and said, “I felt so inadequate.”
Marcus Paige, who graduated last May, reached a point he described as, “I don’t know if there was any more crying to be had.” Among players who remain, Kennedy Meeks felt numb. Theo Pinson recalls how the North Carolina players scattered briefly to their hotel rooms to “try to calm down” before reuniting. Joel Berry II commits near-poetry describing the heartbrokenness. And the piled, tangled emotions in the unusual case of Nate Britt, whose beloved, adopted brother, Kris Jenkins, wreaked the misery, are almost indecipherable.
Here at the Final Four of 2017, North Carolina (32-7) has endured the trap-doored trek to reach the closing Monday night for the second straight April. It will play Gonzaga (37-1) in a match of teams that spent the season as viable candidates for this. It will send the 6-foot-10, 265-pound Meeks against Gonzaga’s 7-foot-1, 300-pound Przemek Karnowski, for a bewitching bout of banging behemoths. The smart general with the achy ankles, Berry of North Carolina, will oppose the smart general with the achy ankle, Nigel Williams-Goss of Gonzaga.
Still, somehow, this whole present day feast will happen with a loud past-tense backdrop. It will be a game with an intrusive question: Will North Carolina’s wee hours of this Monday night be less wrenching than its wee hours of last April 4? The Tar Heels’ 77-74 loss back then to Villanova, which ended on Jenkins’s three-point shot that descended as all the closing red lights came on, surpassed being a mere national championship game. It became a thriller, a standout and an epitome of all things March Madness. Yet for one side, the one with 74 points, it became a rare human experience of parsing complex emotions. “You know, it’s really hard to explain,” Williams began Sunday.
For the obvious, yet evocative, Berry spoke.
“As soon as it went in, it was just heartbreaking, just knowing that you don’t have any more time to be able to go out there and compete again,” Berry said. “It was two teams standing, and then as soon as that shot went in, it was only one team.”
From there, after Williams strained to remind them of their accomplishments and bond, the Tar Heels would return to their hotel. After teary meetings with families and a brief team gathering, seven or eight of their mainstays made it to one room. They purposely left the TV off, Paige said in an interview in early March, certain that it would not – and could not – stop showing Jenkins’s shot. They had a lot to discuss but, Paige said, discussion trickled at first.
Pinson said, “I don’t really remember much,” and that sounded understandable. Some recall details. Britt’s sister, Natalia, stopped by and, because Jenkins had come to live during teen years as a member of Britt’s family, she wore her rare shirt with “Tar Heels” on her left arm and “Wildcats” on her right. Hours would whir by before they would feel hungry, get an Uber, reach a burger place, find it closed and rehire the Uber. “By 4 a.m., 5 a.m.,” Paige said, “you start getting a little delirious anyway.”
He fell asleep at 7 and slept 90 minutes.
They had all lived a sequence of blurry events: a 10-point deficit with five minutes left, a dramatic catch-up on Paige’s difficult shot with 4.7 seconds left, a mind-bending deflation 4.7 seconds later.
“I mean, it’s kind of, I guess you could say, it’s a numb feeling,” Meeks said, “just because we worked so hard to get back to tie the game up and for our dreams to be crushed that quickly, you never thought in a million years that that would happen. Coming out of the timeout, unquestionably, ‘We’re going to get a stop. We’re going to OT, try to play it out.’ But they hit a big-time shot – can’t take anything away from that – but the thing that probably hurt the most is seeing Marcus make that shot that he did. For it to come back that fast and get another one, definitely heartbroken.”
Williams, who adores Paige (like seemingly everyone else in creation), outlined Sunday how he “really felt like that was going to be Marcus Paige’s defining moment, and he had hundreds of them.” He then watched Villanova’s hurried play, but only until Jenkins fielded Ryan Arcidiacono’s pass and let it go. “I knew it was going in. I didn’t even keep looking,” he said. He summarized: “But to have the opportunity to try and play a few more minutes and then have it snatched away . . .” Then, the locker room: “And that’s the part that – that was really hard.”
Through the night among the players, the tone changed. Conversation quickened. Pinson said he thinks he remembers a period of game rehash. Berry, like Paige, recalls a brightening at the thrill ride of being four seconds away. “And so, while we were sad, at the same time, by the end of the night, everybody was just grateful that we had a chance to be here,” he said.
Then there was Britt, Jenkins’s brother. “I just remember it being extremely emotional,” he said. “With our seniors leaving, that was emotional. With us not coming out on top, that was emotional.” With seeing Jenkins again later in the night, that was a different emotional. “I mean, it was crazy, and there was a weird balance,” he said, eventually concluding, “I guess you could say it started as hurt and sadness and then once I saw Kris and spent some time with him I was happy for him.”
By summer, Jenkins would visit Chapel Hill to stay with housemates Britt, Paige and Johnson, and Britt would ask teammate Isaiah Hicks, the defender lunging toward Jenkins as he shot, if he minded Jenkins’s visit. He didn’t, and they all played pickup and whatnot. The subject of April 4 never came up. “Kris is a good dude,” Britt said, “so he’s not going to bring it up, at least for, I feel like, a few years down the line. If we do win [Monday night], then he might be able to jab at me about it for a little bit, just because we would both have a national title, but other than that, I think it’ll be too early for a long time.”
Jenkins will attend, Britt said, as he did the South Region site. Natalia will attend, presumably in an unequivocal shirt. Meeks, Pinson, Berry, Hicks, Justin Jackson and Britt will attend, as the returning players who saw minutes that night. Williams, of course, will attend, to coach his 100th NCAA tournament game. They’re daring to try this again.
