HOUSTON — There are 67 of these every year, but no two losing locker rooms in the NCAA tournament are exactly alike. Inherent in that moment of profound disappointment is the context of a season, of expectations exceeded or unmet, how the exit unfolded.
For North Carolina, Monday’s championship game was the Triple Crown of brutality.
The Tar Heels had been teased into believing they were headed to overtime, and soon thereafter to cut down the nets, after one of the greatest shots they’ll ever see. And then, just like that, they were left to their tears and their smartphones and dozens of reporters asking them how it felt to lose a national title to Villanova on a buzzer-beating shot, denying them a destiny they believed would be theirs from the moment they were ranked No. 1 in the preseason.
VIDEO: Players talk about buzzer beater
“No matter what, we were going to win in overtime because that’s just how the game was going to go,” senior point guard Marcus Paige said. “We had clawed back from down 10. We believed we were going to win. We just needed 4.7 seconds of defense. It didn’t work out.”
It was a brutal scene in North Carolina’s locker room as the shock started to wear off, the quiet broken by One Shining Moment playing out on the court as Villanova celebrated.
Assistant coach Hubert Davis sat on a chair just outside the locker room, staring into space. Kennedy Meeks and Brice Johnson were crying as they embraced. Freshman Kenny Williams started to take off his uniform, then stopped to sit down and sobbed. Sophomore forward Justin Jackson could barely speak above a whisper.
“Just like you can’t really describe the feeling of winning, you can't really describe the hurt that goes with losing a game like that,” he said.
Nobody was taking it harder than forward Isaiah Hicks, who was the first to get dressed. He was the one who should have been guarding Kris Jenkins, who hit the game-winning three-pointer as time expired and got an impossibly clean look after Villanova had to go the length of the court in 4.7 seconds.
But Hicks read a screen at halfcourt as his cue to help slow point guard Ryan Arciadiacono’s penetration. Nobody picked up Jenkins sliding in from behind. Once the pass was made, Hicks lunged out to challenge. But it was all over by that point; there just wasn’t enough time to recover.
“He shouldn’t have got the shot,” Hicks said. “I was supposed to be guarding him but I seen Ryan getting the screen so I tried to help (guard Joel Berry) and forgot all about Kris, the best three-point shooter on the team. Next thing you know he’s shooting an almost open three. It was my man. Completely forgot about him.”
Hicks’ forthright answer was indicative of the way North Carolina players handled the aftermath. Sure, they were crushed, heartbroken. It couldn’t have been easy. But they sat there, one by one, having to hear the same questions over and over as waves of reporters made a circuit through the locker room and made them relive the roughest moment of their basketball careers.
And the worst part is, they were so sure they were about to win. How could they think anything else?
They were down 10 with 5:29 left and trailed by six inside of two minutes, but Paige had willed them back. His three-pointer with 93 seconds remaining cut the deficit in half, his layup with 22 seconds left made it 72-71 and when his ridiculous, double-clutch three-pointer went through with 4.7 seconds remaining it seemed like they were one stop away from a comeback for the ages.
“That’s Marcus,” Johnson said. “That was huge. We thought that kind of got us over the edge.”
Said Berry: “A lot of people can’t make that shot. We just knew that we would have got them in overtime. We were like, ‘We’ve got to get a stop, got to get a stop.’ And they happened to get open and hit a good shot. You have to give them credit for having the poise to knock that down.”
Tar Heels coach Roy Williams looked dazed as he came to shake Villanova coach Jay Wright’s hand, and the emotion was flowing out of him as he exited the locker room and made his way to the interview room.
His mind seemed to be going in every different direction, running through all the shots North Carolina missed close to the basket in the second half, a free throw here or there, a second or two they saved that ultimately gave Villanova enough time to make the last play, the emotion of losing players like Paige and Johnson, who brought the Tar Heels back to this stage after a six-year Final Four drought.
How’s this for cruel? North Carolina, a bad three-point shooting team all year, set a Final Four record by making 11-for-17 in the championship game — and lost.
“The difference between winning and losing in college basketball is so small,” Williams said. “The difference in your feelings is so large. But that's the NCAA tournament. That's college basketball.”
North Carolina's season had been trying in many ways. After starting as the preseason No. 1 the Tar Heels suffered bouts of inconsistency, before turning it around late in the year and once again looking like No. 1. Questions have lingered about about the pending NCAA decision over the academic scandal. In Houston, questions about Williams' health and future had dominated conversations. Some of that would have been forgotten if it had ended a different way on Monday night.
In the locker room, players said, Williams said he wished he could take the feeling away. But he knows how long it will linger, and that there is no escape route from that memory.
One of the greatest shots Williams has ever seen was trumped by the best finish to an NCAA championship game, and every March when CBS rolls the montage of historic tournament moments it will be there for them to see.
“They got the ball up quick and after that all I did was look at the basket when he shot it and hoped that it didn’t go in,” Jackson said. “But it went in. You say you wish you could have somebody to contest it better. You have all these things you feel like you could have done better but at the end of the day Villanova’s a good team and they made some big plays. It hurts.”
