After more games than anyone in ACC history, UNC’s Armando Bacot embraces his last ride
Armando Bacot on Wednesday walked into an NCAA Tournament press conference room for the first time in almost two years. The last time he had, in April 2022, came in the moments after North Carolina’s loss against Kansas in the national championship game. Bacot could barely walk. He needed help getting around. He’d essentially played most of the second half on one leg.
Individually and collectively, the Tar Heels suffered a lot of pain that night in New Orleans. They’d held a 15-point halftime lead that quickly evaporated. There was a sense, afterward, of having let something slip away. If there was comfort in the moment for Bacot, it was this: He could come back. There’d be another chance. His college years were not over; not if he didn’t want them to be.
He had the luxury of time, which is now running out. After five seasons and all the games and all the records, this is now it: Bacot’s final NCAA Tournament. And how quickly his 166 college games have gone by. How fast these past five seasons. After UNC’s victory against Notre Dame on his senior night, two weeks ago, he said he felt like he’d been around “forever.”
And it has felt like that, in a way. Yet in another, he said here on Wednesday, “I feel like we just canceled the season because of Covid, in Greensboro,” he said, referring to the cancellation of the ACC Tournament his freshman year, amid the start of the pandemic. “Now I’m looking back four years later — it was quick now, looking (at it) like that.”
There are, no longer, any second chances. No more wait-til-next-year.
The Tar Heels, the No. 1 seed in the West Region, open the NCAA Tournament in the first round on Thursday against Wagner, a No. 16 seed that won a play-in game against Howard on Tuesday night. The West is arguably the tournament’s most difficult region, with UNC facing a road that could include Michigan State, on Saturday, and Alabama and Arizona in Los Angeles next week.
Chance to be ‘one of those guys’ at UNC
For Bacot, there’s no more do-overs. No coming back to right past wrongs.
UNC’s next defeat this season, if it comes, will be Bacot’s last in college. At most, he has six more games remaining at UNC. And one dangling, uncompleted goal to pursue. He put it like this on Wednesday during an interview with a small group of reporters in UNC’s locker room:
“To be able to be considered one of those guys here, you’ve got to win a national championship.”
And Bacot has always aspired to be one of those guys.
The hope — the expectation, really — was that the coronation might happen around this time a year ago. The Tar Heels returned almost everyone of consequence from that 2022 Final Four team. They began last season ranked No. 1. Their social media team recreated a classic 1981 Sports Illustrated cover with Dean Smith diagramming a play in front of James Worthy and Sam Perkins and others.
The version UNC recreated last year had coach Hubert Davis in the same pose, in front of Bacot, RJ Davis, Caleb Love and Leaky Black. The cover headline, just like it was in ‘81: “North Carolina is No. 1.” It might’ve been the highlight of the season. When it began, something felt off from the beginning. The Tar Heels’ considerable pieces never aligned into a cohesive unit.
They became the first team to begin a season No. 1 and miss the NCAA Tournament, since the tournament’s expansion in 1985. After last season ended, Bacot said here on Wednesday, he tried to tune out basketball. He said he didn’t watch it. He labored to think of who’d made the Final Four. The postseason became a raw reminder of failure.
“I didn’t watch the tournament at all last year,” he said.
Not one game?
He shook his head no.
Not even the Final Four?
More head shaking, no.
“It was one of those where it was just like — I don’t know,” he said. “I just — I couldn’t watch it, honestly. ... And yeah, because it was one of those things where you go from being in that situation (in 2022) to nobody even caring about you. So I didn’t watch it at all.”
While the tournament captured the nation’s attention last year, as it always does, Bacot escaped for a bit to Miami, where “I was having a little bit of fun,” he said with a wry smile. He didn’t frequent the kind of places, he said, with barroom televisions showing sports, and so therefore didn’t run the risk of having to even glimpse any basketball. Besides, he offered instruction, anyway.
“I had the private room,” he said. “So I told ‘em, ‘No TV.’”
‘We’ve got a chance’
The weeks and months passed by slowly after UNC missed the tournament a year ago. The Tar Heels turned down a bid to the NIT. Hubert Davis went about rebuilding the roster, and added Harrison Ingram and Cormac Ryan, among others, from the transfer portal.
The pain lingered, though, for those who’d been a part of perhaps the most disappointing team in UNC’s storied basketball history. There was nothing anyone could do about it, except try to heal and work toward a recovery. Another chance remained, at least.
“It was tough, for a long time,” Bacot said. “Me, RJ, all of us — we just felt terrible for a long time.”
It wasn’t until the Tar Heels’ performance last October in a so-called “secret scrimmage,” against FAU, that Bacot began to feel better. That he began to feel hopeful again. He remembered on Wednesday how UNC played defensively in that game. How he and his teammates, new and old, seemed to gel from the start.
There’d been questions, given the new pieces and the fallout from missing the tournament. And then, at least as Bacot was concerned, there were the answers that came in that scrimmage.
“I was like, man — we’ve got a chance,” he said. “I was telling my people. I didn’t want to tell y’all to jinx it. But I’m like, ‘I think we could win the ACC. I think we could be like a top-five team.’”
‘We want to go out the right way’
Indeed, the Tar Heels won the ACC regular season championship. They spent some time ranked among the top five. They earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
The past several months, Bacot said, have reminded him of “some of that togetherness that we had my junior year, (when) we all just loved playing with each other,” and when he and his teammates shook off an inconsistent regular season and went on a memorable run toward the Final Four; an improbable journey reflective of March’s magic.
When it ran out, in the second half against Kansas, there was some cushion to the heartbreak. Bacot still had time. His teammates did, too. And now, two years later, this really is it for him. After all those games, more than anyone in the ACC has ever played, the final stretch has arrived. After all those records, for rebounds and double-doubles, the end is near. It could come this week in Charlotte. Or the next in Los Angeles. Or, UNC hopes, the week after that, in Phoenix.
“We want to go out the right way,” Bacot said, referencing himself and RJ Davis, who could come back for another season. Either way, this is their last moment, together. “ Just being with RJ and playing with him these last four years have been amazing, and we talk about it all the time — even before the season, just getting to this point and wanting to prove everybody wrong. ...
“To be at this point, really, we’ve got everything ahead of us.”
It was part of why Bacot came back. And then came back again.
This story was originally published March 20, 2024 at 5:57 PM.
