Lucas: March

By Adam Lucas

GREENVILLE—The two opening days of the NCAA Tournament are fantastic if you're sitting at your house, with games on multiple channels and your bracket in front of you.

It's even better at game site, especially when you're in a city that does the Tournament well, like Greenville. There are decals welcoming basketball fans on sidewalks all over a very walkable downtown. A walk around town on Thursday morning revealed fans from Carolina, Illinois, VCU, TCU, Ohio State (in large numbers, a reminder that the large Big Ten schools have massive fan bases even when it's not football), Siena, and two golden retrievers wearing Miami Hurricanes jerseys and tiny dog sneakers.

There were also a couple of Duke fans, because even Greenville isn't without some drawbacks.

It felt like a holiday all day. Restaurants were packed and cheers bounced back and forth across the sidewalk. The Carolina team hotel has a little bit of a 1980's feel, but it also has glass elevators in the main lobby atrium. Those elevators have giant basketball stickers on the lobby-facing windows and giant rim/net stickers on the bottom floor windows, so each time the elevator goes to the ground floor, it appears the basketballs are dropping into a giant hoop.

It's the little things, OK? And although the Tournament does the big things very well—buzzer beaters and small schools against big schools and a perfectly sized bracket that should absolutely not be expanded—it also does the small things beautifully. When you're here, you immediately feel like you're at an event that matters, as soon as you check into your room and realize the Do Not Disturb door hangers have been replaced with NCAA door hangers that read, "Dreaming of Cutting the Nets."

Carolina needs to be part of this. Not as a bystander. As an integral, fundamental pillar of the bracket. This is part of our culture in a way that can't be replicated by anything else. We write notes to get our kids out of school when the Heels play an afternoon game. We travel. It's been this way ever since Lennie and the boys captivated an entire state in the winter of 1957.

There isn't all that much tobacco on Tobacco Road anymore. Krispy Kreme is worldwide. Cherie Berry no longer inspects elevators.

College basketball, though, belongs to us. And that's part of why it is so important not to relinquish it. There can never be a generation that doesn't understand that you always pick Carolina in your bracket, even on the very rare years—and it should be very rare—when they are not a top-three seed. Someone needs to be the next name in the line of Charlie Scott to Rick Fox to Brady Manek to…next.

I am willing to adapt. I will happily go to S&T instead of The Rathskeller to get my double gambler. I understand why we don't have Apple Chill anymore. I can get ice cream somewhere other than Swensen's (make it two scoops, Seth).

But I am not giving up March college basketball mattering in Chapel Hill. Every kid needs to fundamentally understand that you watch the first half of the Cincinnati game with your dad, and then you go to different rooms for the second half which obviously makes Nick Van Exel start missing shots (maybe also Derrick Phelps had something to do with it), then you run downstairs to yell "Can you believe he missed that dunk?!?" and then sprint back upstairs to watch overtime before you run outside to celebrate.

This is normal behavior and I will not tolerate dissenting opinions. The world needs these experiences. Or, at least, my world does.

And my world is a little darker after Thursday's Carolina collapse against VCU. Yours probably is, too. Everything went wrong. Everything. There is no one involved who doesn't share some of the responsibility. Free throws and defensive breakdowns and turnovers without a timeout and Caleb couldn't play and for all I know, you didn't go where you go and I didn't do what I do.

It was right there. Seth Trimble and Jarin Stevenson were throwing themselves on the floor to recover loose balls and Henri Veesaar was putting up another double-double, and up 19 points in the second half, it felt like Carolina in March.

Until it didn't. Then it turned into something else, something that spiraled into an 82-78 defeat and the end of a season and the end of Trimble's Carolina career. With a four-year senior gone, there are legitimate questions about how much Carolina can actually be Carolina moving forward. The Tar Heels were in the championship game four years ago and a top seed two years ago.

But college basketball in 2026 is less about history and pedigree and more about what you are right now. The Heels right now are a team that has lost in the first round in the NCAA Tournament two years in a row and will likely need to restock the roster again before next season.

Because they have to matter in March. This time of year is tense and heartbreaking and agonizing but it is also the very best. It is extraordinarily difficult to win in this particular month, which makes it all the more amazing that so many Tar Heels have done it so well for so many years.

No one is entitled to March. But life is so much better when we have it. Which makes it all the more frustrating that it's already over.

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Jarin Stevenson

Seth Trimble

Henri Veesaar

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