WRAL Sports Fan

North Carolina

Heels get a shot at redemption

By Sam Rosenthal

Apr 2, 2009

Chapel Hill, N.C. — On April 4, 2009, the North Carolina Tar Heels will square off against the Villanova Wildcats in the Final Four.

On April 5, 2008, basically the same Tar Heel team lost to Kansas in last year’s Final Four.

It takes more than a year to erase a memory as brutal as UNC’s 84-66 loss to the Jayhawks. According to Carolina coach Roy Williams, it will take much longer before the scars from the “Kansas game” heal.

“It’s a game that has bothered me. It’ll bother me forever,” Williams said Tuesday. “It bothered me because of the scenario. It bothered me because of the way we played.

"It bothered me because I thought we would really play well. … And plus, I felt like a very, very, very, very – add as many as you want – unfair treatment of me two days later. So I’m going to remember it after you guys are all dead and gone.”

Williams sounds bitter for two reasons. First: Kansas dominated Carolina in that game from the opening tip, opening up a 40-12 lead over the Heels before Carolina even seemed to realize the game had started. Second: Williams wore a Kansas sticker to the championship game, which surprised many.

With UNC’s return to the Final Four this season, recollections of last year’s drubbing in the national semifinal return.

So as a coach, how far down that road of ignominious defeat do you take your current team?

“I’m sure we’ll mention being more ready to play and not going out there looking around up in the stands,” Williams said. “I’m sure we’ll say something about it. I think that we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the scouting report because the first four turnovers were all things that we said we cannot do – and we did them anyway, and we turned it over. But I don’t know how much more we’ll say.”
There may not be much more to say that can ease the pain of losing in 2008, but winning in 2009 might do the trick.

Tyler Hansbrough said the team might use the Kansas loss as a bit of motivation.
“We definitely didn’t come out like we wanted to against Kansas. I just think maybe we were a little blown away by everything that was involved with the Final Four and just didn’t come out prepared,” Hansbrough said. “But we definitely know the position we’re in now, and we’ll know how to handle ourselves.”

Hansbrough said the Kansas game “wasn’t the game that we wanted to play.” And that thought seems foremost on every Tar Heel’s mind: playing the game they want to play this time around.

“Last year, we went out the wrong way,” said junior guard Ty Lawson. “This year, I don’t want to leave anything to chance.”

Lawson’s play so far this tournament has left nothing to chance – he’s probably meant more to his team through the first four games than any other player in the nation. For UNC to take down the Wildcats and their strong backcourt, the Heels need Lawson to maintain his high level of competition.

“We all know what’s coming this whole week,” Lawson said. “Last year it was an eye opener.”

An eye opener in many regards, last year’s tournament exit left the Tar Heel seniors with one final chance to add a national title to their legacies.

And although the Heels have a painful Final Four experience behind them, they still have experience playing in the Final Four, which means a lot.

“There’s a lot more put into the Final Four than any other stage of the tournament, because everybody’s at that one sight, everybody’s watching, and things like that,” Hansbrough said. “But you just have to handle it like any other game and stay focused and make sure you’re doing your part on the team.”

For the Tar Heels, this year centers less on Kansas and more on Villanova and either Michigan State or Connecticut. Still, it feels like a win over Villanova would vanquish the specter of Kansas.

An interesting note about UNC: Each year since its last championship in 2005, Carolina has advanced one game further in the tournament than the year before. In 2006, the Heels lost to George Mason in the Sweet Sixteen. In 2007, they fell to Georgetown in the Elite Eight. And 2008: Kansas, Final Four.

“It was a rough game that happened in the past,” senior Danny Green said. “But this is a new game, a new day, a new year.”

Obviously, the Tar Heels want to make it two games further than last year, bucking their own trend. But as the cliché goes, they must take it one game at a time … and the next one represents a giant hurdle, physically and mentally.

Three-hundred and 64 days later, the Tar Heels get their shot at redemption.