Season Starts Now for Heels

Somewhere along the way, someone convinced North Carolina coach Roy Williams that he should always open with a joke.

And so, after leaving Oklahoma flatter than the FedEx floor Sunday, he did.

"I congratulate the NCAA for having cookies back there today, more than yesterday," Williams said to kick off his press conference after his Tar Heels won the South Region final. "And they're good. We're making progress in every area."

Now Williams won't be accused of being a particularly funny man any more than your accountant or Dane Cook, so for the coach with the vocabulary the Beav might find a tad gooey, this is about as good as it gets.

And it was oh so good for the Heels.

And this is where that mechanized cavalry of a basketball team was after thoroughly dismantling the Sooners. Loose, smiling, and as easygoing as if they'd just come off a pickup court.

They too had opened with a little bit of a joke Sunday, letting Oklahoma win the opening tip before the Tar Heels won everything else.

So the night was for celebration. And laughs. And jokes. And enjoying a great opening.

But every day after would be about righting the wrongs of the last three years. Every day from now on will be about how they close.

For North Carolina, the tournament begins now.

In Chapel Hill, seasons and teams, particularly ones with a constellation of talent like this, are no more judged by what happens before the Final Four than Alex Rodriguez will be remembered for what he does in April. At North Carolina, they don't buy shirts for the Sweet 16 and they don't buy them for the Final Four unless the dog needs something to wear. Heck, the Tar Heels can't even measure their success against their rivals from Duke because the Blue Devils have slipped so far in the rear-view mirror that the pace car is ready to lap them.

Eighteen times now, North Carolina has played in the Final Four, a number unmatched in college basketball. That in itself makes this a successful season, but only a national championship will make it anything other than painfully unfinished.

"I know we have high expectations, it's nothing new to us," said senior Danny Green, who lifted the Tar Heels with 14 first-half points Sunday. "I think it was more this year. They were expecting us to go undefeated and all that talk. We lost a couple games, and everybody thought the world was ending. We knew that we could still achieve the things we wanted to achieve."

And Green is right. Fans are usually the last to listen, particularly when the student body's heartbeat is a dribbling basketball. Watch how quickly Kentucky brought Billy Gillispie in on a private plane and then ran him out on a rail. But this time Heels fans are reasonable in expecting a title out of this group, even with its immense amount of talent.

This was a team built for a title and whose only challenge may be the randomness of a one-and-done environment.

Because If there were such a thing as fantasy college basketball, this would be your roster.

After all, how many times did Ty Lawson alone dash back up the court after an Oklahoma basket to draw a foul or sink a jumper that was more a sneer at the Sooners comeback than bucket? Who knows? By the time you tried to put a mark on the pad, Lawson had already darted down court again.

There's Tyler Hansbrough, the low-post banger who contorts his bodies in fantastic ways like he's made of nothing but pipe cleaner and muscle. There's the senior Green, who can shoot from the outside and make an opposing forward disappear on the defensive end. There's Wayne Ellington, a sharpshooter who has grown even better in the stress of March. And there's future NBAers Deon Thompson and Ed Davis in the middle, freshman Tyler Zeller, backup point guards Bobby Frasor and Larry Drew. Sure, they may not have played tremendous minutes in the plodding 72-point pace Sunday, but the depth of this team comes in oceanic waves.

"They have a Hall of Fame coach, and they have eight or nine McDonald's All-Americans on their team," Oklahoma coach Jeff Capel said. "They bring pros off the bench"


But the Heels have always known these first few steps on the dance floor. The trick now will be not to stumble when they're left alone under the spotlight.

Two years ago, North Carolina strolled into the Elite Eight and held an 11-point second-half lead over Georgetown only to get swept out when the basket shrunk to the size of a coffee cup and the Heels missed 22 of 23 field goals in a 15-minute span.

"Everybody wanted to shoot the dadgum ball then when they shouldn't have been," Williams said about that Georgetown loss in a press conference last week. "They were shooting with too much dadgum confidence, taking bad shots."

Last year, North Carolina moved one step further, leaving scorched earth and badly bruised egos behind as the Heels marched to San Antonio. The Heels won their first four games by a combined 91 points, nearly identical to the 90 points they waltzed through the South region with this year.

Then Kansas staggered North Carolina from the opening tip, dumped the Heels in a 40-12 hole less than 15 minutes in, and just shoveled dirt on Carolina for the remaining 25 minutes.

But if the roster is largely the same, the spirit is made of a whole new metal altogether.

"It's a different team," Green said. "It's a new year, a new day, a new game."

Because this team has already had its backbone tested, with an 0-2 start in the ACC, with a string of injuries that took out Zeller in the second game, Marcus Ginyard, their finest perimeter defender for the season, Hansbrough to start and Ty's toe to finish.

Heck, if they'd weathered any more bad luck, their mascot would've been a broken mirror.

"This team has dealt with a great deal of adversity," Williams said "They've had a great deal of expectations from other people. And they've got us going to Detroit."

They speak of last year's loss to Kansas in the same sort of obvious tones you might use in explaining why you never stuck your hand on a hot stove twice.

"You can't get uncomfortable or feel pressured or rush stuff in the NCAA tournament because that leads to turnovers and bad shots and things like that," Lawson said. "When times are tough, just call a play and relax everybody and get a good shot."

"Last year, we use every experience as a learning experience," Green added. "We don't want to come out sluggish or lackadaisical and let them jump on us because we know how hard it is to dig yourself out of a hole and waste a lot of energy doing that."

And they know how hard it is to get back to exactly where they were at that tip-off one year ago.

The Heels have done that now, motoring to the Motor City and another chance at all that matters for a team like North Carolina.

They did it well. They opened with a joke with four straight laugher wins to make the Final Four.

But the pressure starts now. This is the real season. This is what matters.

And this is what everyone will remember. Not the smile or the joke they opened with.

But how they closed.