Tim Benz: How North Carolina played itself into a unique position in sports

As the North Carolina Tar Heels ride into Monday night’s NCAA Tournament Championship game against Kansas, they are in one of the most unique sports positions in recent memory.

A blue-blood, high-profile, historically elite college basketball team. Yet it’s somehow in the underdog, “playing with nothing to lose” role at the same time.

The Tar Heels did pull off an upset by ending the season of archrival Duke in the semifinals Saturday — and ending the career of Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski in the process. They are also underdogs Monday, as the Jayhawks are favored to win the game by four points.

Rare are the times when Goliath gets to play the role of David. Carolina did it once before in 2000 when they made the Final Four as a No. 8 seed. Syracuse was a No. 10 a few years ago. But those storylines were tough sells then. As they are now.

It’s hard to portray Carolina as putting on Cinderella’s glass slipper when a high percentage of the roster will be wearing Jordans’ in the NBA soon enough. The Heels are a talented team that just took a little longer than expected to get its act together in 2022.

Their devil-may-care attitude for tonight’s game against the Jayhawks is less about how they match up against moderately favored Kansas and much more about knowing that their legacy as a team is set even if they were to lose 100-0.

They are already a Tar Heel team of legend, and they don’t need to cut down the nets in New Orleans to prove it.

“It was good winning, but we want to bring a championship home and hang up a banner,” North Carolina’s Armando Bacot said. “Beating Duke doesn’t give us a banner.”

No, it doesn’t. Bacot and company didn’t win the ACC regular season or the ACC tournament. If Kansas wins, they’ll go home empty-handed from the NCAA tournament as well.

Will it matter?

I bet not to the vast majority of Tar Heels fans. Win or lose versus the Jayhawks, this team will return to Chapel Hill as conquering heroes.

This will forever be the team that ruined Coach K’s goodbye party at Cameron Indoor Stadium. It’s the team that sent Krzyzewski into retirement without a shot for what some thought would be a sixth national championship.

For forever and a day, Krzyzewski’s last game will be a loss to Carolina on the sport’s biggest stage. With the nature of that rivalry, how could anything ever be better than that?

Sure. Winning a title is always the be-all, end-all.

Well, unless you have six of them, as the Tar Heels do. And your school will always be in a position to win a seventh. Maybe an eighth. And a ninth.

Who gets to pull the plug on their most hated rival’s party twice within a month … and on that grand of a stage?

What’s the Pittsburgh analogy? Is there one?

• The Steelers going to Foxborough in the AFC Championship game and beating Bill Belichick in his last game on the sidelines for the New England Patriots?

• The Penguins eliminating the top-seeded Flyers in the playoffs the year before the franchise moves to — I don’t know — Hamilton? Quebec City? Hartford?

• The Pirates beating a Braves team in Atlanta managed by Sid Bream in the 2032 National League Championship Series as Francisco Cabrera Jr. strikes out to end Game 7?

• Pitt upsetting an undefeated Penn State or West Virginia team in a College Football Playoff semifinal?

In any of those cases, would you care all that much if those Pittsburgh teams didn’t win their respective titles in the next round? Obviously, we’d prefer it. But it’d just be gravy, right? Especially in the cases of the Steelers and Penguins.

North Carolina is in that same position. If they win Monday night, wonderful. All the better for coach Hubert Davis and company. If they don’t? They’ll still get a red carpet greeting at the airport.

As they should.

Of course, that’s not how Carolina players are approaching things. Take, for example, Bacot who is pushing through an ankle injury to play Monday night.

“My status right now is that I’m playing,” Bacot said via Sports Illustrated. “There’s no way I’m not playing in the national championship game. My right leg would have to be cut off for me not to play.”

I wouldn’t expect him to say anything else. But if he’s hampered, and UNC loses, his reputation is still cemented on campus. Just like the rest of his teammates.

To be honest, I’m picking Kansas. I have doubts that Carolina can spin around from what happened Saturday. Gutting out that win versus Duke and then mustering up enough energy to beat a very sound Jayhawks club is a very tall order.

Even if I’m right — and a lot of the college hoops experts and oddsmakers are right — 50 years from now, this will always be known as the Final Four when Carolina beat Duke and ended Coach K’s career.

In this unique rivalry, under these unexpected circumstances, if Bacot and company fail to claim that banner, I doubt they’ll be looked at as anything less than legendary in the eyes of most of their fans.