CARY—These are the bad times.
If you watched Monday night’s NCAA championship women’s soccer match, then you already know this. There can be no doubt, right? Coming in the wake of Carolina football losing three in a row, including the Atlantic Coast Conference championship game, and Tar Heel basketball losing four in a row, including the second four-overtime game in program history, then this has to be the nadir. Watching UCLA somehow overcome a 2-0 deficit to snatch a national title from Anson Dorrance, a member of the Carolina Mount Rushmore, absolutely has to be the worst of life as a Tar Heel.
Maybe it is. And if so, then life is pretty good.
It doesn’t feel like it right now. Trust me, I’m with you. In the last 11 days, I’ve seen seven Carolina games in person on two different coasts in six different stadiums or arenas in five different cities. The Tar Heels have lost every single one of them except one—a women’s basketball win over Iowa State in Portland.
Those struggles don’t even count a double-overtime loss to NC State in football that I watched on my phone while watching in person as the top-ranked men’s basketball team simultaneously lost to Iowa State.
As a Carolina fan, over the last 11 days you’ve watched the Heels play eight different overtime periods, and lose every single one of those games. It doesn’t get any worse than this, right? As Roy Williams said in Cary on Monday night while lamenting the way Carolina had controlled play against UCLA but still faced a tough game, “Soccer drives me crazy.”
All of it drives me crazy. But it’s only because Carolina regularly gets so close that we have any idea about this one truth that other schools only see from afar: it’s incredibly difficult to win a national championship. Almost impossible, really. Just think: in the last two decades we’ve seen three heart-wrenching losses mere seconds from a national title: Omaha in 2006, Kris Jenkins in 2016, and UCLA tonight. Any of those losses would be a crowning achievement for many other athletic departments, including several in the ACC and in the state. Around here, they’re the ones we try to forget, because there are so many other crowning…
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