The arc of a life rises, then slopes, then falls, because time is the curvature that ensures nothing is forever. And then there is the exception: the flat line that extends beyond sight, in perpetuity, faithful to its path and resolute in its straight purpose. Dean Smith is the line that flattens the arc.
PITTSBURGH -- What kind of week it had been, one of loss and bloodshed, of hearts kneaded into twisted rubble.
PITTSBURGH — A week that was so hard ended with such ease Saturday afternoon. It brought little solace to a shaken, and stirred, North Carolina basketball team. For the reprieve that it needed was handed, instead, to a team wearing unfriendly colors.
It was a beautiful paradox: Dean Smith, an uncommon man, dispensing gestures so kind and so voluminous to the common men who adored him, who were lucky enough to feel the lasting warmth of an uncommon heart.
The bells had gone off in Marcus Paige’s head. He couldn’t wish them away, thwack them with a rationalizing thought or two. He had to alert his North Carolina men’s basketball teammates.
A late-January game against a middling conference opponent makes the smallest of imprints on space and time. For only the final numbers registered on the scoreboard, and the assigned “W” to the victor and the lonely “L” to the defeated, last as testaments to afternoons that don’t pass entrance exams into memory.
There is little else that springs as much terror in the eyes of a college kid as the prospect of free time deprived.
There was something to be felt after this, an umpteenth nail to the heart. But there's only so much emotional capital in a field hockey locker room, only so much reason to understand a moment devoid of it.
No. That couldn’t have been them. Parading at midfield, looking little the part of a perennial national title contender. Screaming and high-fiving and hugging like a club with little understanding of what it meant to be here, at Henry Stadium, in the NCAA quarterfinals, securing its seventh trip to the final four in the last eight years.
This is a parable. Something about a basketball team finding its way.
Diamond DeShields is a freshman guard from Norcross, Ga. She talked to our sports reporter about her upbringing, her parents’ influence on her athletic career, and what incident made her realize the importance of being a good person.
