UNC men’s basketball team concludes a long, trying week with a loss at Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH — What a week it had been: one of loss and bloodshed, of hearts kneaded into twisted rubble. It would end with more loss, this time the trivial kind, offering a gentle reminder that a game is no more than it says it is. But this one was imbued with more meaning, much more, than the average Saturday afternoon fare.

Roy Williams strolls the hall outside the North Carolina basketball team’s visiting locker room at the Petersen Events Center. His No. 12 Tar Heels (18-7, 8-4 ACC) had just endured a Valentine’s Day crush, an 89-76 loss to unranked Pittsburgh (17-9, 6-6). No team in the last 30 years has shot better in a game against UNC than the Panthers, who found the net on 64.9 percent of their attempts. To them, the rim looked like an ocean, and UNC was but driftwood.

Fitting, it was, because UNC had been adrift, its coach most of all. His mentor and friend had passed away seven days ago, though his initials — D.E.S. — remained Saturday on a patch sewn onto UNC’s uniforms. For Williams they stayed on a lapel button, pinned close to his heart.

On Tuesday, his campus grieved once more, this time for the lives of three students. There was a vigil held in their memory Wednesday and a funeral and burial Thursday. There was a private memorial the same day for Dean Smith. And there was a basketball game Saturday, so incongruous, it was, amid the heartache that preceded it.

“It’s been emotional; it’s been consuming,” Williams said Friday afternoon at the Smith Center before UNC departed for Pittsburgh. “Not just time-consuming: It’s been all-consuming because of the thoughts you have.”

“Stressful,” said forward J.P. Tokoto when asked to describe the last seven days. “We’re not the only ones going through stuff in everyday life. And we get a chance to do what we love in front of people who love to watch. We’re way more blessed than others in situations, and (the shootings) very easily could have happened to any one of us.”

“Like coach said, you realize that life can be taken at any point,” guard Nate Britt said, “and you have to make the most out of what you have.”

It didn’t explain, though, why Pittsburgh outmuscled and outmatched UNC in almost every regard. It couldn’t account for UNC’s one offensive rebound in the first half, or the 22 points Panthers forward Sheldon Jeter scored with such ease, or the seven consecutive baskets that Pittsburgh didn’t miss to begin the second half.

“It was a tough week,” Williams said. “It had nothing to do with the game today.”

Yet his players are human, and they are students, and they are compassionate, too. Marcus Paige was in Woollen Gym with forward Kennedy Meeks on Jan. 13 when a 23-year-old man named Deah Shaddy Barakat approached him. He asked for a photo, and Paige obliged. But Barakat’s friend, unbeknownst to the star point guard, was poised to film a Vine. And Barakat, a N.C. State undergrad and second-year student at the UNC School of Dentistry, who was shot dead in his off-campus apartment last week, had no intention of posing with a Tar Heel. He faked a handshake with Paige, made the “Wolfpack” sign and sauntered away. “He got me pretty good,” a smiling Paige said Saturday. “It was a good joke.”

“I don’t want to belittle what has happened by calling them distractions, but from a basketball-team standpoint, those things affect us, and they carry with us throughout the week,” Paige said later. “In that sense, I would call it a distraction, but there’s no excuse to be made here for what happened (Saturday). At the same time, you do have to acknowledge that there’s a lot going on.”

“It’s a lot to deal with, but at the same time, life goes on,” Tokoto said. “You gotta keep moving. You mourn the death of others, and you just gotta keep playing and keep going through life.”

It stopped for a beat at 11:19 p.m. one Saturday ago, when Williams got the call saying Smith had passed. Since then, he said Friday, his world hasn’t spun so true to its axis, particularly at this time, when conference play reaches a fever pitch and the postseason draws nearer. But that’s OK, Williams said, because this is just a game, and nothing more.

That’s not acceptable to Smith’s widow, Linnea. She told Williams so last week, a friendly smack to the head.

“You know,” Williams remembered Linnea said, “there is a basketball season still going on.”

And remember: Saturday’s game — blowout, really — is more important than it seems, and Williams is still walking the halls. Five Pittsburgh students greet him. They present a banner that stretched through the student section during a pregame moment of silence emblazoned with Smith’s quote, “You should never be proud of doing what’s right, you should just do what’s right.” They carry, too, a letter dotted with messages, all expressing condolences to UNC for the loss of its basketball patriarch.

“I told those kids that I would keep those,” Williams said, his tone soaked with gratitude. “They won’t ever be tossed. I’ll always have them.”

It was a game, and it was a loss, one of the trite kind. But at the close of a weeklong nightmare from which his university still tries to awaken, Williams found reason to begin his postgame remarks with a tale of heartening generosity.

A game, sometimes, means more than it suggests.

sports@dailytarheel.com