Written by Luke Winn at SI.com
It was unfolding like a horror-movie sequel, and not one that would warrant any critical acclaim. Same villain. Same victims. Barely altered plot, with a setting only 8.8 miles away from the original. Grayson Freakin’ Allen—last seen in the Duke-North Carolina rivalry on Feb. 17, a young man in black, making a joyous sprint across the Dean Dome court after a 74–73 upset in which the Tar Heels were shockingly gutted and stripped of a seven-point lead over the final 11 minutes—was becoming a problem again on Saturday.
He had turned a 10-point Carolina lead, with 19:13 left in the second half, into a 49–49 tie with 11:56 left on a pull-up three, and grinned and nodded at a Cameron Indoor Stadium crowd on tilt as Roy Williams called a 30-second timeout to try to stanch the bleeding. The speakers at Cameron began pounding with an infernally repetitive club track called “Turbulence.” The 76-year-old stone building felt as if it were shaking, and the Tar Heels looked as if they might once again fall apart. It would lead to the same inquiries that nagged them after losses to Duke, and at Virginia, Notre Dame and Louisville.
“They,” senior Brice Johnson said, meaning all of us in the punditry, “would have questioned our toughness again.”
And rightfully so, because it would have created a scenario in which the nation’s preseason No. 1 team would be entering the NCAA tournament without a single high-quality road win on its resume, and having made no compelling argument that it had the makeup of a national champion. A scenario in which a veteran team knew, when it walked onto Duke’s home court on Saturday night, that a win would clinch everyone on UNC’s roster’s first ACC regular-season title—and still blew a second-half lead. Williams tried to keep word of Miami’s loss at Virginia Tech, which cleared Carolina’s path to the ACC crown, from leaking into the locker room prior to the game, but as senior guard Marcus Paige put it, his coach “isn’t that slick.” The team caught wind of it on Twitter, so the players were fully aware what was at stake when they left their huddle with 11:56 left in a 49–49 game of the greatest rivalry in college basketball, with all the momentum favoring Allen and the Blue Devils.
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