NEWARK, N.J. — Minutes after losing 76-69 to Kentucky with a spot in the Final Four on the line, the last thing North Carolina’s players wanted to do was talk.
Many players sat dejectedly, with glazed eyes, sniffling and thinking back to the way the game unfolded.
But when they did talk, the players spoke of just how much the team improved during the season.
“We started off slow and we came out strong,” sophomore John Henson said. “We did what no one really expected us to do. We just couldn’t take that next step.”
While the team lost to a team it had previously beaten this season, it still does not obscure the growth that the Tar Heels showed during the course of the year.
It is not that often a team rebounds from a trip to the NIT by going to the Elite Eight.
“I wouldn’t trade my kids for anybody,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “It’s been an unbelievable ride and they’ve been an unbelievable group of kids. And they really made coaching fun.
“We’ve had some adversity and they just kept it together and kept coming back, just like they did today.”
The Tar Heels saw five premature departures from the team between the end of last season and Sunday, but the players that were left stepped up their play to make up for all the departures.
On an individual level, Harrison Barnes has gone from being serenaded with “overrated” chants at each and every visiting arena to finishing his season with the fourth-most points by a freshman in the history of North Carolina basketball.
