In the silence, UNC and Duke make a lot of noise. Did you expect anything else?
We knew it would be weird and it was. This rivalry misses the fans, this game more than any other. What a deafening din they would have made as Duke pulled within a point of North Carolina and time ticked down, the noise reverberating off the walls and ceiling at Cameron Indoor Stadium.
The fans were missed but not needed. Their absence didn’t matter. Nor did it matter that neither team was not ranked for the first time in six decades. Nor did it matter that there wasn’t the kind of starpower on either team that in the past had commanded the attention of former presidents, not that they’d be allowed in under the circumstances anyway.
None of that mattered.
It still came down to the final seconds.
In the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the rivalry abides.
This was the acid test, two teams so far below their usual standards, playing for postseason survival instead of a top seed, both coming off losses that could charitably be described as embarrassing. On this evening in February, even without everything that has traditionally made this rivalry great, it still managed to conjure a meeting that will be memorable as much for what it lacked as what it delivered.
Duke had the ball down two with 15 seconds to play, the result anything but certain after 39 minutes and change. Twas ever thus.
North Carolina won 91-87 in what may well have been an NCAA tournament elimination game, given the trajectory of these two seasons so far. It wasn’t always pretty, but this game did have more compelling moments than it probably deserved.
Two teams that haven’t been able to shoot combined for 21 3-pointers, North Carolina’s 10 tying its season-high in that department. Caleb Love, in the freshman point guard’s best game yet, threw down a dunk that will show up in many future retrospectives. Duke had five players in double figures for only the second time this season, and Matthew Hurt wasn’t even one of them.
In the end, as it so often does, it came down to one play: Wendell Moore, driving with Duke down a point in the final seconds and UNC with a foul to give, leaving his feet and finding no space at the rim. The Tar Heels planned to foul before the shot and Moore expected it, but Leaky Black, defending Moore, had four fouls and pulled away. Moore landed with the ball. Travel.
Black’s foul trouble may have won the game for the Tar Heels, and seconds later he put it away for the Tar Heels at the free-throw line.
(Only in a pandemic would Duke not be in the bonus in the final minute at home, but we digress.)
Time expired and the yells of the North Carolina players filled the empty space. We’ve become accustomed to that this season, these new sounds of basketball in a pandemic, the exhilaration of players celebrating with each other and no one else, the cries of “and one!” after nearly any contact. They have always been there, but they’re audible for the first time, above the absent din.
But that silence is not necessarily new to the rivalry. When Austin Rivers (in 2012) and Moore (363 days ago) scored at the buzzer to defeat North Carolina in the Smith Center, they did so in a building muted by shock. Duke’s on-court celebration, both times, was the only sound amid the sudden hush.
So it was again Saturday, North Carolina’s players making all the noise in a building silenced by something else entirely. So it would have been anyway after a win at Duke, pandemic or not.
