The Tar Heels defeated the Bulldogs 71-65.
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It’s OK, Carolina, you can open your eyes.
North Carolina Coach Roy Williams, who took a shot at President Trump for compulsive tweeting, on Monday said he doesn’t know if he’d take his NCAA basketball championship team to the White House.
Perspective will come, but in the locker room some 30 minutes after losing the National Championship game at the hands of North Carolina, 71-65, Gonzaga put on its best face and handled the loss just as it did all 37 of its program-record number of wins: with grace.
GLENDALE, Ariz. (AP) – Joel Berry II headed a trio of players for national champion North Carolina named to the all-tournament team for the Final Four. Tears would continue at the interview dais when they forced him to stammer through, “We did a lot of things people didn’t expect us to do this year”. “Everyone is going to take a different angle at it that we all have right now”. “I’m about to give everything I got.’ I knew he would, too, We just didn’t want to come up short again”. This Gonzaga team went where no other Gonzaga team had been before, reaching the Final Four for the first time in school history. Monday night, exactly 365 days later, they finally found redemption.
On the next possession, junior forward Justin Jackson – who had turned in an bad performance to that point – made an outstanding basket cut and finished at the rim through contact to tie the game.
Of course so did Nigel Williams-Goss’s ankle tweak.
Gonzaga had to grind out a victory over a physical SC team in the national semifinals and faced another ugly one against the blue-blooded Tar Heels, exacerbated by a shower of second-half foul calls by the officials.
“He’s been in the pool, hot tub, cold tub”, said Williams, who passed his late mentor Dean Smith by winning a third NCAA championship.
“Isaiah made, I think, I don’t have the stat – I have a stat sheet but I don’t have play-by-play”. “I’ve got three because of these guys right here”. Jackson had 16 on a 6-for-19 night and, overall, the Tar Heels shot 35.6 percent for the game, to go with 36 percent shooting in Saturday night’s semifinal victory over Oregon.
“When I looked up at one of the boards tonight and saw those guys, they had more titles than our North Carolina teams had, not Roy Williams, because I don’t like it that way, but that was a little emotional for a second”, Williams said.
Hicks changed the game in the second half.
Karnowski made two free throws to tie the game at 52-52.
Each team had 22 fouls but it was the big men who took the brunt of it. But as Karnowski was flailing after the ball, he inadvertently grabbed Berry around the neck.
Neither Few nor Williams threw much blame toward the officials, but the refs made this game virtually unwatchable.
Berry was shooting just 28 percent (17 of 60) in the first five tournament games for UNC (33-7), including 8 for 34 (24 percent) from 3-point range. The Tar Heels drove the ball inside far more in the second half, getting easier shots, building up the fouls on Gonzaga and gaining an edge they needed to win. It set up the Hicks layup to put Carolina ahead by 3. The problem was that photos of the play show Meeks’ hand on the end line while he had his other arm around the ball.
“My teammates believed in me”, he said. “That’s tough to hear”. Twenty years ago, this sort of run at that sort of place looked virtually impossible.
The Bulldogs tried to keep the big picture in mind – they had the lead in the national title game with less than two minutes to play.
“We’ve been investigated 77 times, it seems …”, Williams said.
This was a championship game only North Carolina fans could love.
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“They wanted redemption”, Williams explained.
