Thank You, Alyssa Ustby.

Photo by Agatha Lund

They started in silence. On November 25, 2020, North Carolina began their journey through college basketball's all-time strangest season. One played in empty gyms, with only the sounds of the immediate participants for atmosphere. The bass notes of thudding dribbles and grunts from hard-set screens hummed under the mid-range crosstalk of players and coaches calling out plays and switches. The high-frequency keening of sneaker squeaks, occasionally halted by shrill referee whistles, chittered over everything.

Swishes fizzle-cracked like bottle rockets; a brick off back iron sounded like someone had whacked a sheet of aluminum siding with a crow bar. And into that eerie stillness stepped Courtney Banghart's first full, true recruiting class in Chapel Hill.

Alyssa Ustby has noted a few times since that she actually dragged down the overall ranking of that freshman class. As absurd as it seems now, at the time Banghart was taking something of a gamble on the Minnesotan. There are no words in any language to properly articulate the magnitude of the payoff.

The silence gave way to a tremor which begat a low rumble which swelled to a crescendo which ended in a roar. Only one player stayed to experience the full decibels of the finale.

Look at Lyss' stats from that first game, a tidy 90-61 demolition of Radford in Carmichael: 13 points, six rebounds, three assists, two steals, and a block in 26:07. Only two numbers are wildly out of alignment with her career at UNC: The six (she would average north of eight boards from her Sophomore year onward and 9.5 in each of her final two seasons), and the 26:07, which is practically lollygagging by Ustby Standards. She clocked well above 30 minutes a game for her career, including a grueling 33.9 her senior season. This COVID-granted fifth year she finally caught a break thanks to some improved bench depth, and was allowed to luxuriate at a comparatively chill 29.9.

 The only other anomaly of that game: she came off the bench, which would never happen again after December 14th of that year. Everything else in that first box score is a startlingly accurate forecast of the next five seasons. Alyssa Ustby didn't become the most reliable and essential player in the revival and restoration of Tar Heel Women's Basketball, she WAS THAT GIRL, right from jump. A truly remarkable combination of Swiss-Army-Knife versatility and Swiss-Watch precision and dependability.

Offensively, she was a wing whose purview eventually stretched from a three to a small-ball five, and even a nominal 2-guard in a pinch. Her arsenal of low- and mid-post moves and footwork was astounding by the end. Sliding from sheer bully power to sly angles and step-throughs. Shots from every conceivable vector, like a veteran pitcher changing arm slots and release points on a whim. That nifty bag would eventually clear 1,000 career points. (She also, tentatively, hoisted the occasional trey, and while this was never her sweet spot, she did seem to hit them precisely when Carolina needed it most some games.)

Her prowess on the other end of the floor was equally special. Strong, smart, and capable of playing far bigger than her size, yet simultaneously nimble with cat-quick hands and great lateral movement. Top it all with near-omniscient court awareness that allowed her to anchor and morph the defense into the suffocating swarm CB has always hung her coaching hat on. The disruption, the denial of position or driving lane, the steal, or the block loomed wherever she was on the floor.

And of course, the rebounding. There is nothing that has defined Alyssa Ustby's tenure in Tar Heel Blue like her work on the boards. And it goes far beyond just the dizzying numbers. How is a captaincy conferred, leadership earned, and a standard set without having to say a word? A diligence and persistence bordering on monomania, is how. You outwork everyone else on the floor, every time, always, in pursuit of errant shots. You feverishly clean the glass over, under, and around bigger bodies through sheer cussedness and a disregard for your own back, knees, and general personal safety. That's how records which have stood since 1980 finally fall. (Cassette tapes did not overtake vinyl as the top-selling medium for commercially purchased music until 1985; that's how ancient and unreachable 1,251 rebounds was before our girl set foot in Carmichael.)

What did Carolina need? Lyss would provide it, expand upon it, and make it a weapon, every time, no questions asked. When was it needed, and how much of it? No worries, she was good for it all without fail. The defense, the points, the boards were a near certainty, and indefatigably delivered to boot. 37 minutes, 38, 40, more in extenuating circumstances of OT? You can find plenty of those games scattered throughout her career game logs.

These polymath qualities of Ustby's hoop game comport exactly with everything else we know about her. This is, after all, a high school three-sport athlete who also won a PPK competition at the Carolina Spring Game. Someone who spends her down time developing additional outlandish skills like juggling while riding a ripstick. Y'all this woman plays jazz piano. You could not come up with a more perfect analog to her on-court persona than the instrument in any good quintet which can both play the lead *and* demonstrate supreme artistry in comping, in the voicings and colorings that support the other players.

Five years on from that first Radford game, Lyss can look back on a Tar Heel career replete with memorable games, moments and accomplishments. A bevy of wins over State and Dook (including a few rather significant upsets). Vengeance over Louisville, who have habitually been a thorn in Carolina's side since Ustby was in, oh, say, grade school. Some truly breathtaking takedowns of perpetually Top-5 Notre Dame. Two Sweet 16 trips, including what will forever feel like the first major turning point of the Banghart era: that epic 2022 battle with eventual Natty winners South Carolina in which the Heels gave no ground and went nearly to the wire against the best squad in the land. And of course, this year's

Win or lose, Ustby's reliable constancy across so many games makes calling individual memories to mind somewhat difficult, but two come to mind with perfect, crystalline clarity:

January 4th, 2024: a stately little 75-51 romp over 'Cuse. Carmichael was rowdy that night, a testament to the tent-revival transformation Ustby's class had already wrought. Sometime around the middle of the second quarter, the esteemed dean of UNC Women's Hoops scribes RL Bynum pointed out on Twitter that Lyss had a real shot at a triple-double, along with the somewhat shocking revelation that it would be the first in program history. The rebounds came first (of course), and then the assists. Word of what we might be about witness shot through the stands like chain lightning. When Lyss got to nine points in the third quarter, the whole crowd went to Defcon Two, celebration-ally speaking. Then Ustby stepped to the stripe a little later in the quarter. Rarely has the crowd-clap-hands-up sounded louder or been accompanied by more sincere prayers. The shot dropped. 10 points. Trip-Dub. Defcon One, and a fusillade of wild cheers and applause. The most endearing part of the whole moment was the look of genuine confusion on Alyssa Ustby's face when Banghart pulled her so she could get her flowers, followed by giddy, dawning comprehension that she was the reason for the delirium that made freebie had unleashed when she found out what she'd just done.

That one was for her, a pause where we got to shower her with so much love that was both in recognition of the specific feat she accomplished, but also a sort of tidal wave of back-loaded affection for a player who rarely had the spot light but was nearly always the fulcrum around which Carolina would pivot on a given night.

The second was much more recent, and probably will be the first image most Heels fans conjure up when we think of her: Standing on the scorer's table after dispatching West Virginia and earning the second Sweet 16 trip in four years. The whole weekend had already been special; Carolina's first time hosting postseason games in Carmichael in ages and a packed-out barn that showed how large a fire the team had lit under the fan base and the community. She'd secured the rebounding record the game before, against Oregon State. The atmosphere felt then remarkably similar to the Triple Double Game, a win comfortably in the bag and a whole crowd counting down to Alyssa Ustby doing something miraculous. The scorer's table moment topped it, somehow. The team had been making a victory lap around the perimeter of the court, soaking up the cheers and adulation they'd rightfully earned and basking in their accomplishments. When she hit that table, screaming with her arms up, y'all, the roof came off the joint. This was what she stayed for. The belief in a vision of Carmichael looking like that, sounding like that. The bookend roar to the silence she started in.

And it had to just absolutely, thunderously sing for Alyssa Ustby. After having been denied her Senior Day by the rarest of all things, an injury that actually kept her heretofore Terminator-esque self off the floor, she was in Carmichael one last time for this moment. Five years of grind and sweat ringing in the rafters not just for her but for what she helped build.

A while back, Courtney Banghart and Carolina took a chance on a kid from Minnesota and asked her to be part of laying down a new-era foundation. Thank you, Alyssa Ustby, for staying for that roar, which was also the sound of the foundation settling. The future of Tar Heel Basketball is bright and solid and assured in large part because you spent five incredible years in Chapel Hill. Any rock, after all, can be a cornerstone. When it's a precious mineral that's been cut and polished over time, you call it a gem.

Comet.

All losses hurt. Losses in March hurt worse. Losses like THAT ONE in March are especially cruel and agonizing. But it happened. It should not diminish what this season was.

And yes, let's get to the catharsis and exorcism part of this straight out the gate because all of us feel this way right now: Carolina should have been on the damn 4-line and hosting. Instead they had to trek up to the godforsaken wastes of Columbus. If that game had been played in Carmichael, it's different. The Heels got hosed on several calls, but three will be burned into our collective synapses for eternity: K-Mac being whistled for getting smacked in the face? Preposterous. That 5th foul on Des? Unconscionable. The phantom "moving screen" on T with the game almost literally on the line? Un. Freaking. Forgivable. If even one of those is just a no-call, the game is different.

 If just ONE of the cavalcade of bunnies UNC missed at the cup drops, the game is different.

And God knows if no one gets hurt, the game is absolutely, positively different.

It was about as tough a loss as I've ever seen.

But y'all, let's take a second to marvel over the end of that game. Eva and Deja went down injured within literal minutes of each other. That left the ensuing huddle absent both Carolina's leader/floor general/most reliable bucket and their best 3-point threat. They were down two starters and 12 points with just seven minutes left. And it was at that moment 'Lys and Toddy went full-tilt "eff it, let's just do it and be legends." They absolutely hounded the Buckeyes defensively and started furiously pouring in buckets on the other end. They ignited a 13-2 run down the stretch, stubbornly clawing the Heels back from the brink.

Deja miraculously reappeared with 2:33 to go. She'd been carried off the floor and limped to the locker room just five minutes previous, and a return had seemed extremely unlikely. Yet DK somehow flung herself at the rack on her one good leg, drew a foul, and drained both freebies, pulling the Heels within a point. Then P blazed to the cup off an OSU turnover and UNC had its first lead of the game, 67-66. The Buckeyes answered back, but Deja tied it back up at 69 all on a signature mid-range J.

Y'all know what happened after that and we don't need to dwell on it. The point is what this team did from the moment Eva left the court until the buzzer. Everything that could possibly have gone wrong up to that point had, in fact, gone wronger. An abysmal start, poor shooting, worse officiating, critical injuries. But for those last eight minutes, Carolina was incandescent. Or maybe incendiary is the more apt descriptor. They simply BURNED; an all-heart-no-quit comet blazing up and down the floor of Value City Arena.

There is a larger point, too, in how many people watched that glow. How many breaths were held, how many heart rates went into V-tach. That magical eight minutes, and everything that preceded it this season, was bigger than it was before.

During the broadcast of the game, they showed a highlight that almost instantly brought me to tears: Jamie Cherry draining a buzzer-beating J to beat Ohio State in The Dance in 2015. I was in the building for that shot, and I've been thinking about it a lot since they aired it again. More specifically, how much has changed.

What has happened since Courtney Banghart set foot in Chapel Hill is nothing short of a miracle. Ags and I have spent years watching somewhere between decent and really-freaking-good squads in Carmichael bust their asses up and down the floor with a lukewarm home atmosphere. There were loyal fans, but small in number and short on fervor. This year, Carmichael was much closer to a tent revival or a revelation.

Our barn was so loud, so passionate this season. And that was what Coach Bang and this team had been building to. Deja said it best in an interview she did with the Carolina Insider Video Pod, when they asked her about coming out to the first sold-out crowd in years against NC State: "We built this."

And they did. The thing about building is you have to get people involved, and this squad, this season, has done that. You could clock this on a macro level, with how packed Carmichael was this year game after game, and how loud. But the micro level is where the resonance and beauty lies.

Let me tell y'all about Jordan and Danielle. They hadn't been to many women's hoops games before last season. Went to a couple. Got season tix for this year. This team changed their lives for the better, and that's not hyperbole. After the Heels took that L to OSU on Monday, Jordan took a whole, heart-felt Twitter thread to talk about what this squad has meant. (I am not technically savvy enough to screenshot, but I am quoting directly here): "Becoming a season ticket holder wasn't as good as I thought it would be - it was FAR better. The best decision I've made in quite some time."

And let me tell y'all about my boy Josh who lives in FREAKING NEBRASKA and has never set foot in Chapel Hill, as far as I know. He's on this here Carolina Blue Train now. Probably because he got to talk to Toddy on Spaces a few times but mostly because I think him and a lot of other folks are getting it. They're seeing the joy and beauty in this team, and Carmichael, and all of it.

And there are so many more, so many faces I didn't recognize but who kept showing up this season.

That's the magic and transubstantiation this team worked this year. People who don't remember Jamie Cherry are feeling now like we felt about that shot. This team moves and shifts minds and hearts, it translates, it embraces and elevates everyone who chooses to bear witness, to love it. That got passed down from Charlotte Smith and Sylvia Crawley to Camille Little to Jamie Cherry to Jaelynn Murray, and from Jaelynn to this squad, to Deja and 'Lys and Toddy and Anya. We are bearing witness to Carolina Women's Basketball as handed down through generations. This is inheritance and osmosis. It's the comet we watched in that last eight minutes of this season writ large. A bright light streaking across our vision at high velocity, raising our eyes to the sky and the infinite possibilities up there.

Still Running.

 

 

What if Wile E. Coyote simply kept running? You've seen the bit a million times: The hapless furball chases the Roadrunner off the edge of a cliff, and for a few seconds he keeps right on going, unaware that he's no longer on solid ground. Then the realization sets in ... his feet stop churning ... he looks down ... there is a sad, direct-to-camera *boink boink* cartoon blink, and ... 

The Tar Heels came close to reenacting this moment twice this season.

The first was the horrific skid right around the holidays. UNC rebounded from a baffling 63-87 road loss to a Grace Berger-less Indiana with three straight victories over inferior non-con foes, but then everything took a precipitous turn.

A loss to Michigan in Charlotte, followed by three straight L's to open conference play. They were staggered and straggling, playing uncharacteristically uncertain basketball in a way Courtney Banghart's teams simply do not. It wasn't just that shots weren't falling or that they were coughing up too many turnovers. They didn't look sure of themselves, as if they didn't trust the set they were about to run even as they called it.

Then there was an almighty convulsion and a lurch of sheer will; the metaphysical version of yanking a plane out of a tailspin. We're never going to know what went down in the players-only meeting after a hard-fought road loss to the 'Canes in Coral Gables on January 5th, but whatever it was shifted this squad on a tectonic level.

There were portions of the ensuing Notre Dame game in Carmichael where the #4 Irish flat-out looked like they didn't belong on the floor with Carolina. Ditto for State, Duke (twice), and the absolute hammers UNC dropped on Clemson and Virginia. (The former of which finally saw the debut of Kayla McPherson, who is so terrifyingly fast that Paulina Paris threw an outlet pass a full eight feet behind her because P simply didn't clock how quick her burst in the open court was.)

I'm not sure there are words in any language that can fully convey the absurd luxury of bringing Kayla, P, Des, Teonni, and Lu OFF THE BENCH, but my GAWD the amount of different looks, versatility, and unending fresh legs and speed is something else.

There was the second near-fall, of course; where everything I just described evaporated in a wave of injuries. It turns out that when you remove Eva and 'Lys from this team for several games, it's really hard to win. Pair that with a road-heavy swing in the schedule and you get losses at Louisville, 'Cuse, and State. It looked like the wheels were coming off, and there was a shook, janky feeling to the games without two (and in one case three) starters. For the second time this season, this team was an uneasy watch, every game carrying a vague sense of foreboding.

Miraculously, though, the Heels got healthy in time to slug out one of the rock-fightin'-est games I've ever watched to spoil Duke's senior day and notch a regular-season sweep, and followed that up with their first ACC Tournament win since 2019 over Clemson. (What happened the game after that, you ask? Mind your own business and keep it moving, buddy.)

Twice this year, Carolina ran off the edge of the cliff. Twice, they could have looked down. The could have fallen. But they didn't. In a few hours, we'll find out if they get to host the first couple rounds of The Dance in Carmichael. It's worth an entirely separate piece on what that would mean and how utterly electric that place will be if it happens. But they're not in this position if they had glanced down and allowed gravity work. Instead, they just kept moving, kept pushing forward. And they're still running, clear off the cliff, sprinting across air that feels like solid ground.

Let It Breathe.

 

Some games are breezy like a good margarita. You can kick back, sip on it steadily, let the booze do its work, and wind up pleasantly buzzed off an easy W. Some, like walking into Arizona's home barn in the tourney last year and smoking them, require vigorously popping the champagne. Some are a shot of chartreuse: bitter and you're glad when it's finished. (See: last year's debacle against Georgia Tech.) Yesterday's road tilt at JMU, however, was a wine game. Sometimes you get the result you want only after opening the bottle and letting it breathe a bit.

This particular vintage, bottled in Harrisonburg, VA, carried strong top notes of last year's run-in with Boston College. This is to say that Carolina got into a rock fight with an inferior opponent, played uncharacteristically listless basketball for a stretch, and looked just generally out of sorts until about the third quarter. At which point, Deja Kelly did exactly what she did in Chestnut Hill last year: decided "We are absolutely the hell not losing this game," and made it so. The Heels trailed 34-30 at the break, and Kelly had heretofore only tallied two points. She came out of the half with a flamethrower, finishing with a team-high 22 along with five rebounds, two assists, and two thefts.

Deja was in position for those second-half pyrotechnics because Eva Hodgson and Alyssa Ustby absolutely balled out, keeping the Heels in it with 18 and 15 points respectively. Eva shot a a blazing 50% behind the arc, and tacked on two assists and a key rejection for good measure. 'Lys racked up eight boards, five dimes, and two blocks in another display of her supreme versatility. Anya Poole only notched six points but cleaned the glass with aplomb en route to 12 monster boards. Destiny Adams and Paulina Paris didn't flash much on offense, but played lovely defense for stretches, including Des continuing to demonstrate what is becoming something like a preternatural ability to jump passing lanes. Kennedy Todd-Williams had something of a quite night, notching a 8-2 line with a steal before succumbing to foul trouble, but she was her usual imposing presence defensively, keeping the Dukes' offense out of both rhythm and position on a number of vital possessions.

Teonni Key had four rebounds and a steal in 14 minutes, but given what we saw in the previous game, it feels safe to assume that she'll be a huge part of the rotation after she's gotten fully up to game speed. Malu Tshitenge only logged one minute of play, but I have to think a road dub was still a pretty good birthday gift. Happy belated, Lu!!!!!!!

Games like this aren't uncommon early in the season, and sometimes taking the win with plenty of areas to emphasize for improvement is better than an absolute blowout. The Heels have a stiff test ahead on Thanksgiving,  facing Oregon in what will amount to a home game for the Ducks at the Phil Knight Invitational in Portland, OR. Until then, they let it breathe, and we can all savor the bouquet of the first road win of the year and a 4-0 squad. Y'all be well, and as always, Go Heels!!!

TC-Who?

 

Carmichael wasn't as full or rowdy as it usually is this afternoon, but it didn't seem to matter much for UNC as they cruised to a 75-48 demolition of TCU. Five Tar Heels racked up double-digit scoring on the day, paced by Toddy and Alyssa's 14 points each. Des logged a career-high 10 along with seven boards, continuing the absolutely massive leap she's taken from last year's freshman performance. Deja put up a 12-6-7 and is clearly well-evolved into her role as the primary floor general this year, though her ankle was obviously still bothering her. The MVP of the day though, at least to my eyes, was Anya Poole, whose 10 points and seven boards only tell a fraction of the story in terms of what she did out there today.

The only comfort I could possibly offer the Horned Frogs (if I felt like it, which I do not) is that it could've been a whole lot worse. Had they not shot a blistering 37.5% from behind the arc, this would have been something closer to a 40- or 50- point whooping. And they bombed all those threes because they quite literally had no other choice. And this is where we need to give Anya ALL her flowers. She calmly and casually decided that absolutely no business was getting done within eight feet of the rim today. Like, none whatsoever. TCU's posts could not establish position at any point, couldn't even try to call for an entry pass, because Anya pit-bulled them all game long. Her footwork, her positioning, her strength and body control were as close to flawless as you're going to get. It was one of the best individual defensive efforts I've ever seen in Carmichael, full stop. Her control of the paint meant that the rest of Carolina's murderous defense was free to do what it does best: swarm and snuff out everything. The Frogs, even with that stellar 3PFG%, only shot 25% from the floor, and as Matt Krause pointed out on Twitter, that means they only shot 15.6% on twos. (Read that again.) Tack on UNC forcing 24 turnovers and winning the rebounding advantage 47-30 and it's a wonder the game was this close. (To give TCU their props, it's not like UNC conceded the three-point line to shut down everything else. They simply shot the lights out on what were mostly well-contested looks.)

It was a sign of how dialed in the defense is that no matter what lineup combinations Coach Bang put on the floor (and she ran out some really fun, interesting variants today), there was virtually no difference in how absolutely suffocating the are. 

Look, it wasn't all great for the Heels today. The offense was choppy in stretches, and they continue what is a worrisome trend that goes back to last year of mediocrity in free-throw shooting. You can get away with that against an over-matched opponent, not so much in March. It should be noted that some of the offensive struggles today were due to TCU running a press-and-trap defense for most of the game, which is something I consider both a supremely annoying strategy and just plain cowardly for any team other than University of Alaska Anchorage, whose patented "Mayhem" defense is too dope to be mad at. They finally stopped when Coach Bang gave them a taste of their own medicine for a few possessions down the stretch which they did not enjoy one bit.

Some other quick highlights: Ali and Lu were extremely good defensively when Anya sat, and the Lu-Anya two-big lineup looks to have taken a big step forward defensively. There was also some nifty passing from the pair of them that we hadn't seen before. I'm not sure exactly how much Deja isn't trusting her jumper right now because of that ankle, but it didn't prevent her from absolute afterburner speed in transition and she was flying around like always on defense. And we must not leave before shouting out Toddy's preposterous move late in the game; a sort of modified-Eurostep-ball-fake where she exploded for a finish at the rim. I'm not sure anyone on TCU had functioning ankles left after that play. It was so filthy the whole bench was laughing about it for a solid few minutes afterwards.

Overall, it was a dominant performance from a dominant team, and UNC moves to 2-0 with some things to work on but also a lot that's already clicking in high gear. This team is on its way to big, big things, and we're lucky to bear witness. Until next game, y'all be well, and as always, Go Heels!

Light.

 

Toddy flashed to the left, just behind the arc, and buried her second consecutive trey to open the third quarter. The Heels were en route to a 91-59 demolition of Jackson State. That moment, when the roof seemed to come off Carmichael, was an echo, or maybe just a reiteration, of the best moments of the past several seasons. We were here again, standing in our barn, watching the Heels cook. The defense was exactly what it was the last we saw them; a beautiful, exacting calculus of stifling precision. The offense, even with a hobbled Deja Kelly, was majestic. Toddy and 'Lys and Eva were pure fire, and Destiny Adams has clearly taken a massive leap from her freshman year. She jumped two passing lanes on the way to four steals, but the first is the one I'll remember. Snatched the ball out of thin air, hit the afterburners, and just streaked up the floor coast-to-coast for a bucket. She's miles ahead of last season on both ends already. And Paulina Paris, GOOD GAWD, y'all. Scores at all three levels and has absolutely FILTHY handles. They're not even fully healthy yet, but this team is about to wreck some shop.

We saw old friends on Wednesday too. Our beloved section mates Ginnie and Jean, and our seatmates from the past few years Jeff and Debbie, who we thought we'd lost last season but were back after some health issues. It was so wonderful to see them again, to hug them and watch Carolina put down a whompin' on an opponent. It felt like what it always feels like in Carmichael: home.

This past August, Ags and I went to the Outer Banks. We met up with our friend Joshie (who married us) and his wife Sarah and their adorable kiddo Frank. On the way down, we stopped at a botanical garden and at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright Brothers pioneered human flight. We also stopped at several lighthouses, relics long since out of both utility and time now, but they were beautiful and they fascinated me. I can't stop thinking about them, even now.

Out there, at the edge of the state, far from Tobacco Road, one thing still holds true of North Carolina: There is a basketball hoop in damn near every driveway. Back home in Chapel Hill, there are three courts close enough that we can hear the pick-up games grunting and calling fouls, or the kids standing alone, shooting free throws, from our back porch. On the Banks, you drive narrow, two-lane streets where people don't care about speed limits, but there are still kids getting up shots in driveways, dreaming of a time when they might be hitting shots in Carmichael or the Dean Dome or Reynolds or  or (if they have no taste) Cameron Indoor.

The lighthouses, though? They might be an even purer distillation of what UNC Women's Basketball is going to be this year.

The French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel was born in 1788. He devised a lens of sectional, concentric parts of glass, allowing the light to be channeled in a specific direction. Prior to that, lighthouses just lit what amounts to a very big lantern. After Fresnel's invention, they could aim the light, point it out the the specific dangerous waters they needed to warn people about. There was a a focus and purpose to this, a direction. If you've ever done time in a theater, you've hung plenty of lights with these lenses inside them up in the grid. You also may have seen them if you've ever been in a basketball arena, because they hang up there too.

Last year, the Sweet 16 showing, the sheer velocity and adrenaline, was an absolute light beam. It shone a light we all could see and it was lovely to behold. But this year feels focused, feels refracted and shined out to a specific point. This year, the Heels stand in a light with purpose, a light meant to shine and reflect on them and them alone. This year, they ARE the light.

Ten Games, One Season, And The Future.

 

If you let this past season of North Carolina Women's Basketball wash over you, it would feel like a wave cresting in swirls of Tar Heel Blue; breaking against the shoreline but with a bigger wave already forming on the horizon. I've been thinking a lot about what we witnessed this year since it ended. In the near-decade Ags and I have had season tickets in Carmichael, we've never seen one like this. And the more I think about it, the more I can see the dots on the map. The inflection points and brush strokes and splashes of paint that made the overall picture. After a lot of pouring over box scores and sorting through my memory banks and re-watching a whole mess of games and highlights, these are The 10 Most Defining Games of UNC's 2021-22 season.

1. vs. NCA&T 11/09/21. Good ACC teams are supposed to take first game (i.e. typically lesser non-con) opponents to the woodshed, so the 92-47 win here was simply meeting expectations. This one was important nonetheless, for two reasons: 1. The Aggies made The Dance in 2021 via the most exciting non-Heels game I watched last season when they clinched the MEAC title over Howard. Even having lost some important players, they were not exactly a team to be taken lightly. 2. This set the blueprint and provided the thesis statement on what Carolina could be at their best this year. The sophomores were what jumped out right away. Deja was a step faster on the floor and ten steps faster in processing the game and making quick,  smart passes. Toddy's handles and shooting range had evolved to match her already phenomenal defense. 'Lys had added several new gadgets to her Swiss Army Knife game. And Anya's strength, footwork, and positioning in the post had amped up considerably. Pair all that with the arrival of stellar guard Carlie Littlefield, reunited with Coach Bang in Chapel Hill after their time together at Princeton, and the potential of this starting five was suddenly immense. Off the bench, Eva showed exactly why Coach had picked her up out of the portal with lethal shooting and her constant communication on defense. Lu was more confident offensively and more shifty/crafty on defense. Mo and Des, the (not-injured) freshmen, immediately flashed their capabilities. And, of course, Jaelynn, the unquestioned heart and soul of this team, would make her presence felt on-court or off, because it's what she does and who she is. Their overarching ethos was so clear from the opening tip onward. Efficient ball movement, leaking out at breakneck speed in transition, the team-wide all-gas-no-brakes motor, and most of all a relentless and perfectly calibrated defense. It's supposed to take teams with new players and new roles to play (which is to say most teams in most years) a few games to find themselves. The Heels had it all on lock from jump.

2. @ Minnesota 12/01/21. They call basketball arenas "barns" because in the early days of the sport, a lot of games took place in literal ones. They'd clear out the space, hang up some baskets, hastily construct some bleachers, and it was go time. (For a great portrait of this period in women's basketball history, I highly recommend Lydia Reeder's "Dust Bowl Girls.") These days, the last extant and specific  reference to this is Williams Arena at The University of Minnesota; AKA "THE Barn." After blowing past every opponent so far by double digits, the Heels went to Minny for a true road test against a B1G opponent. This one was back and forth the whole game, with both teams making runs that could've capped it. Carolina had to dig down for every point and rebound, but pulled out the 82-76 victory in the end. Typical of the year, the box score was a ledger of balanced contributions and shared glory, but this was Anya Poole's night, y'all. 12 points, 16 boards, three dimes and three blocks. Her control of the paint unlocked everything else and stifled the Gophers at every turn. The other four starters and Eva all scored in double digits, with Lys' amazing 19-11(reb.) effort being the other double-double. In their first huge test of the season, UNC passed.

3. @ Boston College 12/19/21. Even the best teams get out over their skis sometimes. Exhibit A from this season would be South Carolina's inexplicable loss to Mizzou, but this one had a strong case as Exhibit B for the Tar Heels, despite eking an eventual 76-73 win. I think Coach Mac is building something very cool and very good up in Chestnut Hill, and it didn't surprise me at all that Boston College came out swinging. That said, UNC might have been glossing over this game a bit mentally, and did not play up to their standard for a good chunk of this game. Carolina led 17-16 after the first quarter, but BC won the next two by a combined 14 points, leaving UNC in a hole going into the final frame. What transpired after that was Carlie and Deja basically deciding "we are NOT losing this game!!!!" They were twin flashes of electric light down the stretch, getting to the rack and to the line, canning clutch J's, and willing the Heels to a 29-13 fourth-quarter scoring margin. Deja finished with a 19-3-4 line and Carlie with 22-3-1. Both had three steals. It must also be noted that  this doesn't happen without Eva, who put up a critical 15 points with four boards and five dimes off the bench and came up big on defense as well, especially late in the game. It should have been a less stressful effort, but in the end Carolina kept the record clean, advancing to 11-0 and well on their way to a spectacular year.

4. @ Georgia Tech 01/23/22. Look, I said "Most Defining Games" not best or most fun, OK? This 55-38 shellacking in McCamish Pavilion at the hands of Nell Fortner's squad was horrifying to watch, but also a valuable learning experience. All the beautiful cuts and cross-court passing and outlets on the break that UNC had profited from heretofore were completely neutralized by the Jackets' overwhelming size and length. Tech simply snuffed out and/or staunchly contested anything Carolina tried, leading to 29.1%/23.1%/27.3% shooting splits for the Heels. That 38 points? Their lowest point total of the season. This wasn't just a humbling experience for a team that had mostly been cruising all year. It was an outline of precisely where their limitations were given their relative lack of size, how they'd been exploited, and a back-to-the-drawing-board imperative to make sure it didn't happen again. UNC had been smoked 45-72 two games prior by NC State in Reynolds for largely similar reasons, but getting walloped on the road by an eventual 1-seed in the tourney ain't the same as this. Going forward, this game made Carolina smarter and more careful, though no less ambitious when they had the chance to cook. Literally, metaphorically, and possibly even metaphysically, the Heels had been cutting hard and precise all year. This was the game that tempered the blade.

5. vs. NC State 01/30/22. Sorry to give y'all two L's in a row, but this is the last loss in this rundown, I promise. As alluded to above, Carolina got destroyed in Raleigh, but the game against the Pack in Carmichael was a much different affair. Toddy and Carlie put up a combined 27 points and 11 rebounds and the Heels absolutely scrapped like hell the whole game. If not for State outscoring them 23-11 in the third quarter, UNC might well have won this one. The important thing here was the toughness. They didn't let that first loss get in their heads. They fought. They played their game as flat-out and as hard as they could. It didn't work out, but 66-58 as opposed to the chasm final score of the previous meeting showed how much they'd learned and grown. This was the end of the downswing. After this, it was all apex trajectory. Starting (no disrespect to Jen Hoover and Wake Forest) with ...

6. vs. Miami 02/06/22. This was the game Carolina took the restrictor plate off the car for the rest of the season. The Heels dumped an 85-point barrage on the 'Canes while allowing a total of 38. Miami's scoring totals by quarter: 2, 11, 12, 13. Bear in mind, this Miami squad went on to ball themselves all the way to the ACC Champ Game. Katie Meier's teams are never to be messed with idly. And UNC just flat-out took them apart in every aspect. This was also the Ustby game. Not her gaudiest totals on the year by any stretch, but her most completely dominant performance. 'Lys had 11 points, 10 boards, two dimes, two blocks, and a steal. And y'all, she was just EVERYWHERE. All the time. She did a thousand little things that don't show up in box scores and she did them all game long relentlessly. She wasn't soloing, she was comping; a McCoy Tyner-esque display of understated brilliance. (She's a jazz pianist; the analogy feels apt.) It was how the whole team had already been playing, but this one showed us where subtle tremors could lead to earthquakes. UNC took on a really good team and completely dismantled them. It was exhilarating to witness, and we loved every second of it.

7. vs. Louisville 20/17/22. FINALLY. UNC beat the Cards. Sent 'em out of Carmichael with a big ol' L. More than even NC State, this team had vexed Carolina at every turn over the past ... well, forever or so. This was a collective win. Toddy and Deja poured in the buckets, Carlie and Eva dished and scored as needed, and Anya crashed the glass with some excellent help from elsewhere. This was a battle from jump and both teams were amazing, but the Heels pulled out the dub in the end. Matt Krause's call of Chelsie Hall's last-second trey attempt will ring in our collective ears forever: "It bounces once ... It bounces TWICE ... IT BOUNCES TO THE FLOOR!!!!!" Taking out an eventual 1-seed in The Dance, a conference opponent who has been a world-beater alongside State for the past five years, is the sort of win that can turn a program's fortunes and define the future. Being in Carmichael for this one was pure cathartsis.

8. vs. Duke 02/27/22. This was the All-Vibes game. Senior Day against those ... people, over in Durham, is always a thing. But it wasn't this year; or at least it wasn't the most important thing that day. This one was for Jaelynn Murray, period. Win, lose, whatever, the biggest thing was how Jaelynn came in and immediately started dropping buckets, just flat-out cooking. It was the perfect end to her career in Carmichael. She has been, always, since she stepped on campus, the pulse of this team. And when she went off like that, there were plenty of cheers, but there also was not a dry eye in the house for Carolina fans. Stomping Duke 74-46 was almost an afterthought. If you weren't crying already when Jaelynn buried that last J (I was), you just had to look at the Heels' bench and watch them going absolutely bonkers for our girl. The connection between Jaelynn Murray, this school, these fans, and this place will be eternal.

9. (Technically) @ Arizona 03/21/22. Carolina blitzed past SFA to get out of the first round of the tourney for the first time in a while. Then they had to deal with a phenomenally difficult challenge: A Wildcats team playing in the comforts of home, where they had only lost once all year, and that was to Stanford. This was last year's runner-up for the Natty, a well-coached and well-balanced squad who had been hooping at peak levels all season.  It didn't matter in the end. The Heels nonchalantly waltzed into their home gym and delivered a 18-point beat down. This was Toddy's apex-predator game from start to finish. 19 points, seven boards, five dimes, and three steals. Coach Bang has called her the "Scottie Pippen" of this team, but she's also a "Jurassic Park" Velociraptor, a hyper-intelligent and destructive presence whose speed and feel for the game counteracts everything anyone else anyone tries. She is the unquestioned tip of the spear for UNC's suffocating defense. She put all of that on display in this one, and coupled it with a jaw-dropping offensive performance. Throw in Deja dropping 15 and Lys' 12-12, and 'Zona never had a prayer. Making the Sweet 16, especially against this opponent and in these circumstances, was a truly special accomplishment.

10. vs. South Carolina 03/25/22. Every game from #6 onward on this list was a notification of sorts, a steadily mounting stack of evidence that Carolina was to be taken seriously. This one officially flipped the switch in the national conversation from "don't sleep on UNC" to "y'all don't want this smoke." Both Vegas and HerHoopStats had the Gamecocks by double digits prior to tip off. This wound up being a four-point game with two minutes left. Eventually, the Heels fell to the Gamecocks, just like everyone save Mizzou and Kentucky did this year as SC rolled to Dawn Staley's second National Title. But that 61-69 loss told the whole world this team can hang with anyone. Carolina squared up against the best team in the country and made them earn the dub, even without an interior player remotely capable of slowing down NPOY/DPOY/Everything-Else-OY Aliyah Boston, who finished with an insane 28-22 on the night. (PS - a healthy Teonni Key changes this game significantly.) We have to shout out Ali Zelaya here, whose 10 points and three boards off the bench were massive, especially with several Heels in foul trouble. That said, here are three more words: Deja. Freaking. Kelly. On a national stage and in the most intense crucible possible, Deja put up 23-5-3 on 50% shooting with a block and two steals to boot. I may or may not have dragged my laptop to my work-from-home station last season to watch the season opener, and the first thing out of my mouth to Ags afterward may or may not have been "We've got Baby Hollywood." This game showed the world I wasn't far off. This team showed the world that something special is happening in Chapel Hill, and that Carmichael is a PLACE TO BE if you want to watch brilliant, electric, selfless basketball played by a team that is long on talent but longer still on joy and belief.

There's a bit in the co-authors' notes of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's "Good Omens" that has stuck with me ever since I first read it. Pratchett talking about Gaiman: "He's no genius. He's better than that. He's not a wizard, in other words, but a conjurer. Wizards don't have to work. They wave their hands, and the magic happens. But conjurers, now ... conjurers work very hard. They spend a lot of time in their youth watching, very carefully, the best conjurers of their day. They seek out old books of trickery and, being natural conjurers, read everything else as well, because history itself is just a magic show. They observe the way people think, and the many ways in which they don't. They learn the subtle use of springs, and how to open mighty temple doors at a touch, and how to make the trumpets sound."

That was this season of Carolina Women's Basketball. Not magic, but a conjuring. Hard, subtle, painstaking work which produced something that looked and felt like magic, but was far more real and lasting and resonant. This was the jump point. From here, it's off into the Wild Tar Heel Blue Yonder. I can't wait to be in Carmichael for whatever comes next. Go Heels. 

Thank You, Jaelynn Murray.

 "The game can’t save you. But practice, though: practice can. Practice is hard, practice requires work, but practice keeps things alive — in games, in kindness, in love ... What’s left is what’s practiced, what’s passed down, what is carried along when everything else is left behind." - Spencer Hall.

Jaelynn Murray laced 'em up for UNC for the first time on November 10, 2017, in a 70-66 loss to Hampton. It was a different team, a different coach, and what feels like a lifetime ago. She started most of the games her freshman year, and then a cavalcade of bad injury luck and just plain poor circumstances put her in a reserve roll for the rest of her Tar Heel career. Your eyes won't pop looking at any of her box scores, but y'all, it needs to be said out loud and full-chest that she's probably the most important player in what Carolina has become since she stepped on campus.

Teams take on the identity of their coaches, certainly. That manifests in offensive philosophy, in defensive hustle, in the HOW of on-court performance and off-court workouts and all the general hoops ephemera that makes a basketball team sing. No one who has watched this team would deny that Courtney Banghart's imprint on the Heels has been one of excellence and sheer joy. Going from a team that occasionally shocked better teams and made The Dance but lost opening weekend fairly consistently to a team that just went four quarters against South Carolina in a Sweet Sixteen match-up and did not back down an inch is a massive accomplishment and it doesn't happen without Coach Bang. But it also, very much, does not happen without Jaelynn Murray.

If you watched the pre-game-get-hype huddles in the tunnel at Carmichael, you noticed that Jaelynn was the emotional centrifuge at the heart of them. If you went to road games and a "TAR!! HEELS!!" chant got started, Jaelynn was the one standing up off the bench and raising her arms up, urging us on. Come on, y'all can do better, be louder, give us our love. Her joy was infectious and powerful for her teammates and the fans alike. She was a nuclear reactor of good vibes that detonated every game and shone a light we all reflected.

When Jaelynn was out for the 2019-2020 season with a knee injury, Janelle Bailey switched from her number 44 to Jaelynn's number 30 uni for the year to make sure she was always on the court with the Heels in spirit, if not in actuality. That's the level of importance she had for this program. That's a kind of special you just don't see that often, but that's who Jaelynn Murray is. The engine and propulsive force that moves the team, whether she sees the floor or not on a given night.

On Senior Night this year, you could feel the Jaelynn Effect on full, Marshall-Stack Amplifier levels. The thing she's taught this team over her time here is not effort; you don't get to be a high-level athlete without that baked into your DNA; it's the more subtle but more important lesson that effort plus joy for you and those around you and fighting towards a common goal with you has a cumulative effect. That playing the game is not as important as the people you play it with. She has been the heartbeat, and everyone else picked up that pulse. That's why, if you looked at the bench when Jaelynn subbed in while Carolina was smoking Duke that afternoon, you saw her teammates going absolutely bonkers when she started putting in buckets. There is not a column for soul or resonance in a box score, but UNC has one in their collective hearts every game. And that came from Jaelynn Murray.

That's the legacy she left when the horn sounded Friday night against South Carolina. Deja and 'Lys and Toddy and Anya and Lu and Carlie and Eva and Des and Mo and Alex and Ariel, Teonni and Kayla (even though they didn't get on the court this year). Her joy, her love, sings through everyone on that team. She left it to them, like a precious, secret heirloom. And they'll make sure the next kids who strap 'em up in Carmichael get it too; that they carry it forward.

This magical team we watched this year, and all the other iterations of Carolina Basketball that are coming after them; they're not what they are without Jaelynn Murray, without her vibes and verve and the way everyone else understood that they not only needed, but WANTED that same emotional level, every day, all the time. Thank you, Jaelynn Murray, for everything. Wherever life takes you next, your impact on this team will hang in Carmichael like a banner, which is to say it will be there forever.

Apotheosis, So Far.

 

South Carolina rolled up in Greensboro and beat our team. That happened, and we recognize it and move on. What this UNC team did this year has been maybe the most joyful, pure thing of my entire sports fan life. They played free and loose and maniacally beautiful offense and absolutely operated on a defensive string on the other end of the court. They fought to the buzzer, always. They loved and scrapped and played together, always. They were a beautiful, almost telepathic collective force of hooping wonder at all times, ALWAYS.

They kicked ass last night. Not enough to pull the dub, but damn well clear enough to put the rest of the nation on notice. South Carolina is, by any sane observance, the best team in the country, and the Heels stood toe to toe with them for four quarters in a Sweet Sixteen game and did not flinch. Even in significant foul trouble, they were aggressive and focused and played the game the way they wanted to play it. There were some trips to the stripe where they could've put the ball in more consistently (this has been a thing all year) and I don't even want to think about the second quarter shooting splits, but even playing an uneven, janky game, Carolina hung with the best in the land.

And here's the thing: This is very much a beginning and not at all a one-off fluke. Deja Kelly went nuclear last night and that's not going to change. Toddy and 'Lys played slightly below their offensive peaks but were killer-murder-velociraptors on defense, like they always are. Carlie and Eva were uneven but brilliant in stretches, and Alex and Anya played their tails off trying to contain the force of nature that is Aliyah Boston.

UNC hadn't been this far in The Dance in a good while, and last night they proved they belong not just in the conversation, but as a main talking point. And the whole world saw and recognized it. This squad put everyone on notice this season. Next year will be transcendent.

A few other notes from my experience last night: 

 

1. Ags was not feeling well so I went to the game solo. I wound up sitting in a sea of South Carolina fans, and I totally get why Dawn calls them "Fams" now. They were delightful, kind, lovely folks who talked hoops and shot the shit with me all game like we'd known each other forever. At the half, I got up to go get a beer and a hotdog, and the woman on the end of the row letting me by said "y'all have a great team, I feel a little bad you're in the middle of all of us by yourself." I told her they were way more pleasant than most of the NC State fans who come to Carmichael once a year and that I was happy to be sitting with them. Her response: "Oh honey, we have to deal with Clemson fans, I get it." That woman is a national treasure.

2. Sports are f***ed up and we all know it. For the most recent example, you need only Google Deshaun Watson. College sports in particular exist on the far end of the horrific, exploitative spectrum. We compromise daily by loving our teams, none of whom are blameless or without flaws, no matter how much we want to tell ourselves otherwise. But when the game ended last night, something really cool happened: The arena staff put then end of the Saint Peter's/Purdue men's game on the jumbotron and every TV in the concourse. Two fan bases who had just spent the past two hours rooting against each other dropped their respective heartbreak and elation in a heartbeat and the whole place was suddenly screaming their lungs raw for a small New Jersey school none of us had heard of two weeks ago. When the Peacocks pulled out that win, we all, collectively, went bonkers. That was a MOMENT, y'all.

And that's why me and every other Tar Heel was in that barn last night. Not for the Saint Pete's thing, but to watch UNC Women's Basketball sweat and grind and work and to watch Deja Kelly become a goddess on a national stage and to watch this amazing team stand tall and take every punch South Carolina threw and to answer, right to the end of the horn. We were there for the MOMENT, and even though the final score didn't end favorably, the MOMENT was special.

Salvation

 

Over the last days of August and the first few of September in 2021, I was in the hospital. It was not because of COVID, or any other physical ailment. I had given up. I did not want to be alive anymore. There was my job, where we are ostensibly supposed to help people in dire need but are rarely allowed to actually do so. There was a virus which our country largely did not take seriously because the asshole in the highest office in the land said it was a hoax. There was the country that put said asshole in office and all that said about us as a nation and the awful, shuddering resonance of what that meant. I am immuno-compromised, and have lived the last few years in complete terror every time I cough. And have lived under the shadow of the fact that large swaths of my family (including my parents) voted to destroy our country rather than allow anyone who does not look or love or pray like them to have a home here.

I wound up on an involuntary commit for suicidal ideation because the totality of it all had finally destroyed me. The hospital stay did not make me better, by the way. First: putting someone with a busted-ass immune system on a mental health ward with people whose functional capacity was not conducive to wearing masks was not fucking OK. Second: All I saw was more of the same shit I see at work everyday. People who have been failed, repeatedly, by the healthcare and educational and legal systems of this country and just shoved aside into places where the rest of society doesn't have to think about them.

I am incredibly fortunate, blessed, and privileged that my sister-in-law happens to be an advocate for wrongly-hospitalized/incarcerated mental health clients. I am lucky that my parents, despite their abhorrent political beliefs, dropped everything and came up to North Carolina to be with me. Above all, I am lucky my wife called CHPD Crisis when she did, and that she welcomed me home. I am lucky I got to go home at all, that such a place even existed. My roommate during my stay left the same day I did, because, "the shelter has a spot open for me." I offered him money, and a spot in our guestroom, but he wanted to do things on his terms, and who the fuck am I tell him otherwise?

I came home a mess, of course. I was not functional. Not until we got to Carmichael for the first game of the season. Just being in that barn again, doing all the chants, clapping when the ball went into a free throw shooter's hands ... I can't fully articulate what that meant. Sharing hugs with Ginny and Jean (we've had season tix in neighboring sections for nearly a decade) was so special and healing.

I have a lot of shit to deal with, but this UNC Women's Basketball team is helping me a little bit at a time. This team can't heal me fully. There are probably years of therapy before that. But they have been a mental health salve.

You watch this defense, on a damn string, absolutely flying around and snuffing everything their opponents want to do. You watch KTW just destroying people, you watch the rest follow like they're almost teleporting around the floor. Someone gets hung up on a screen? *BAM* Another defender comes out of nowhere.

And then you watch what they do on offense. Jesus. That transition game, that murderous pace? At it's best, it's the fucking Sistine Chapel. It's Billie Holiday and Aretha and Sister Rosetta Tharpe all rolled into one. They're telepathic assassins and it's awesome.

Most of all, it's the collective joy. This team loves each other, loves hooping together, loves just being on a court so damn much.

Watching this team is a pure delight. Loving this team has kept me alive.

Being in Carmichael this year has been a tent revival. I don't much believe in Christianity anymore, and that's a whole different conversation, but this squad gives me FAITH in something. I can't define it, but I know it's special and important and real.

I know that barn means more to me and Ags than any place other than our home. I know this team is special and that Coach Bang is building something transcendent. 

I know this team is capable of pure brilliance.

And I know they've saved me from death because of it.

And I will love and cherish them for the rest of my days for that.

Cradle This Moment

 

On May 13 2015, Alfred Joel Horford flew into the frame on my television to put back a blocked layup and give the Hawks a 3-2 series lead over the Washington Wizards in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. It had been an incredible year already. 

 

The Hawks had ripped off a 60-win regular season playing beautiful, collective basketball. The following game, Paul Pierce's last second three to tie the game was waved off. I still remember the sick feeling in my gut while that play was under review. I lived in Boston for five years a while back and, being way too broke to afford League Pass, watched a LOT of Celtics games as a way to get my hoops fix. I knew what Paul Pierce was about. I turned to my wife during the timeout before the in-bounds and said something like "do you know how many times I've watched The Truth curl of a screen on a play like this and drain a three?" Which he did. But, mercifully, it was a not-buzzer-beater this time. The clock hit zeros before the ball left Pierce's hand. The Hawks went to the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time in my life. They got obliterated by LeBron and the Cavs in a four-game sweep, but that season was a hell of a ride.

From then to now, the running joke of Atlanta sports heartbreak has been going strong. The Falcons had 28-3. Angel McCoughtry got hurt mere days before the playoffs in the midst of a truly magical season for the Dream. (We win a title that year if it doesn't happen and you can't tell me otherwise.) The Braves (change the name and stop the chop, please) blew a 3-1 lead to LA in the NLCS. The Dawgs went through 4th and 26 and the next year's SEC Championship Game, both of them heart breakers. If the Five Stripes hadn't brought home that MLS Cup, we'd really have broken the curve on the misery index.

I was born in Atlanta in 1982. My formative sports memories are a horrendous Braves team (minus Dale and Phil, who were awesome), a listless, disheveled Falcons, and the Hawks. The 'Nique, Spud, Doc Hawks who put basketball in my soul probably before I could form a coherent sentence or use the bathroom by myself. Those years were full of awe and splendor. A packed-out OMNI going bonkers when 'Nique threw down a filthy dunk right on some hapless defender's dome. Of course, the apex was still heart break, the first real one I have a memory of; the famous/imfamous Bird-'Nique duel in game seven of the Eastern Conference Semis in '88.

Ever since, outside of the '95 Braves and the aforementioned ATL United run, the litany of "almosts" and "what ifs" is long and gory. Soul-crushing loss after soul-crushing loss. Lather, rinse, repeat. This Hawks season ended in similar fashion, but it felt vastly different.

I keep thinking about the 1991 Braves, and the parade Atlanta threw them after that worst-to-first season that ended in a seven-game loss to the Twins in the World Series. Even in defeat, they had raised the city to heights of ecstatic jubilation that hadn't really been felt before. Even more than the 2015 squad, that was this year's Hawks.

Look at what happened after Nate McMillan took over this team. They were looking at the draft lottery again until that coaching change. Then a supernova bloomed in the heart of the city. Trae Young showed the whole country what Hawks fans have known since the draft night swap: he's THAT GUY. Like 'Nique. Like Dale. Like Julio. It's not just his brilliance on the court, it's the infinite swag. The bow in MSG, the pre-3 shimmy in Milwaukee, that dude is COLD in a way that feels so perfectly aligned with ATL. And the front office put a team around him that just freaking works. Red Velvet (TM @SheBeKoolin), JC, AKA John The Baptist (#PayDaMan TM @femaleatlhawk), De'Andre Hunter, who was having a magnificent season before his injury. Cam Reddish, who, even in a loss, had a damn COMING OUT party last night. Clint, Bogi, Solo, and on down the line. This team is an ideal mixture of youth and experience, insanely talented, and exquisitely calibrated. They will be giving the league hell for years to come, and the last few weeks have been a transcendent proof of concept.

The Hawks came to Atlanta from Saint Louis in 1968. Until this season, they had been to the Eastern Conference Finals once (the Cavs series I mentioned up top.) Until now, they hadn't won a game in the ECF. But this year and this team were special. They stormed out of the NBA's basement after the coaching change and played two epic, seven-game series to take out the Knicks and Sixers. They rolled into Milwaukee and took game one with Trae officially showing anyone who hadn't figured it out yet precisely what a badass he is. Then they took a game in ATL without him after a fluke, stupid injury. That's two more ECF wins than any other Hawks team ever had. He tried last night, the whole team did, but there just wasn't enough gas in the tank, even with the Bucks missing Giannis. 

Listen, NONE of that matters right now. NONE. OF. IT. All the joy, the miracles, and the pure, giddy, delirious hope we just experienced are enough today. And it should be. No sane hoops person would have told you in February this is where the Hawks' season would end. They're a mile ahead of schedule with a full off season to get healthy and nothing but possibility and promise stretching as far as the eye can see.  Whether or not a banner ever goes up (I think it will), we need to keep this joy close. I've already seen plenty of haters on the TL today talking shit. Fuck those people. Let this team and this season reverberate in your hearts and drown them out. What we feel right now, the hope and delight and boundless optimism, it's rare. Especially in for ATL sports fans. Cradle this moment with your entire souls. It's worth celebrating, even if the rest of the world won't.

WEEEEELLLLCOME ... And Goodbye.

We can't stop listening. We've burned through most of the "Disaster" episodes and the live shows and played the last pod at least three times. We've cried at almost everything at some point this past week. The people who made Shutdown Fullcast would not want any sappiness or sentimentality, so I'll try not to get too extra with this.

But: I'm fairly certain my wife and I were more excited driving to the Charlotte live show than we were on our wedding day.

The Shutdown Fullcast cannot be explained, defined, or articulated in any meaningful way. It's just a way to think and feel about college football in podcast form that resembles nothing else connected to the sport. The chaos and irreverence that Spencer Hall, Ryan Nanni, Jason Kirk, Holly Anderson, and their various guests brought to our earbuds for the past several years was absolutely perfect. (It was a perfection of dubious audio quality and deranged musings, but perfection nonetheless.)

What they did was dig into the vast stupidity and sprawling brilliance of the game with eccentric credulity. My wife's best friend lived with us for a bit a few years ago, and she asked me once why I listened to a podcast about college football that clearly thought college football was insane and dumb. (Note: It is. We love it because humans are wired to be sentimental idiots.) I didn't have a response. You get the Fullcast or you don't. Plenty of college football diehards would fall into the latter category. Pity them.

We were sitting in a bar in Ketchikan, Alaska in 2019 on our honeymoon. The bar had good, free wifi. Our first thought was not to connect and catch up on news of the world, but to download the Ann Arbor live episode that had just dropped. We saw so much incredible beauty on that trip; it was a perfect week, but one of our favorite memories is laying in bed very drunk on a cruise ship listening to Ryan explain how Michigan birthed every other college football program and Jason explain how they conquered the entire B1G.

Or we were driving to Charlotte bumping previous 40-For-40 and/or Disaster episodes on the way to the live show. That night, we laughed our asses off for two hours and met the people who actually made this incredible thing and they were so kind and wonderful. We also had a genuinely great time with/made a new friend who happens to work for the South Carolina athletic department and rocks hard with Dawn Staley, which is dope because we are also women's hoops junkies. (S'up Don. You are the gaht-dang coolest and it was truly wonderful to hang with you. Ags and I are gonna get to a hoops game in Columbia and buy you dinner if this shit ends and we still have a functioning country.)

Or we were sitting on the porch talking about things that have nothing whatsoever to do with college football but doing it in our specific language which is at least 30% Fullcast jokes/references. (Oh no! OHHHHH NOOOOO!!!!!)

Look, it's a silly podcast about a silly sport. It's also bigger and more important and funnier and smarter than that. It's the thing I'd save until I left work so I could listen to it on drives home from bad days. It's the thing Ags and I have listened to collectively more than anything else. These brilliant lunatics have given us something beyond words, beyond coherent thought. It just is. It just was.

I have faith it will be back in some form, but if it's not: Y'all are a lovely bunch of genius misfits that taught us a new vocabulary for this game and gave immeasurable joy to innumerable people.

Listening to all these episodes feels like some sort of weird requiem. We're paying respects to something that is gone. But that ain't right. The Fullcast needs to be memorialized in song.

Just take those old records off the shelf.

Casio Dog, play "Neck."

Looking Forward, Looking Back

The broadcast cut away to something else. I don't even remember what it was; just that it wasn't the post-game celebration, interviews, trophy presentations, and pageantry the Seattle Storm deserved. Not after clinching the championship of what was quite possibly the greatest season in WNBA history with a Finals sweep of the Washington Mystics. Maybe it was the dynastic rivalry aspect of Lynx/Sparks, but they didn't cut out early in 2016, when Candace Parker gave us one of the most poignant, beautiful, and instant waterworks-inducing moments I've ever seen in a lifetime of watching sports:

But this year, after a playoffs riddled with late starts on alternate networks and overt disrespect for the game, ESPN/ABC/NBATV all decided the final moments of the 2018 WNBA season weren't worth celebrating. This was a final slap in the face, a last evidential stamp on where the W stood in relation to its broadcast partners and, by extension, the viewing public, doubters, haters, and general misogynistic vitriol that has plagued the league since its inception.

There was a palpable enthusiasm and purpose coming into this year. After all, we'd just seen maybe the greatest NCAA Women's Final Four of all time, and there was a concerted push to carry the interest generated by that spectacle forward into the WNBA. Websites were either expanding or springing up out of whole cloth and hiring extremely talented writers to boost coverage. My podcast feed went from having two women's hoops pods to eight at warp speed. Everywhere from established platforms like ESPN's "Around the Rim" to upstart blogs to the truly beautiful and life-giving community that is #WNBATwitter, one mandate emerged: Grow The Game.

Certainly, there are elements of that growth process we can't control. Fans and media won't be in the room for the next round of CBA negotiations. Decisions on revenue sharing and travel policy, the two most critical issues that need significant overhauls for the good of the league, are not things anyone outside the W's power structure can have a direct hand in. But those conversations and the leverage the players hold in them will be predicated on viewership and attendance numbers, which tie directly to advertising revenue, which could increase those numbers even more, and so on. We have reached a critical inflection point for the game, and we all want that graph to curve upward. I have an idea about how to achieve that, or at least to help. It's a small one, and possibly misguided and/or ineffectual, but I've been thinking about it for a while now, so please bear with me.

There was an episode of "Around The Rim" a while back where the guest informed them that Smith College actually played the first ever women's basketball game. I had always thought the first game was Stanford vs. Cal at the San Francisco Armory on April 4, 1896, but that was the first intercollegiate game. (There is a $3 Kindle book well worth your time called "The First Women's College Basketball Game" that compiles student and local newspaper articles leading up to, during, and after that momentous event.) But the first time a woman put a ball through the hoop wasn't a sanctioned college game. Of course it wasn't; college basketball didn't exist when it happened. James Naismith rolled the ball out for the first time on December 21, 1891. The first ever basketball game was a scrimmage at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts. It was an entirely new sport. The first women's basketball game would therefore have been a scrimmage too, not an official intercollegiate match up. And so sometime in March 1892, Senda Berenson, then the newly minted "gymnastics" coach at Smith College, replicated Naismith's experiment with what proved to be raucous and enthusiastic results.

In the context of modern women's basketball, this seems like an incidental piece of trivia, but I think it's actually vitally important. December 1891 to March 1892 is a few months, a tiny blip on the timescale. This is essential because in public perception, women playing basketball is a relatively new thing. Most of the invective thrown at women's hoops is flat-out sexist bullshit, but at least some of it stems from a lack of understanding of the roots of the game. The majority of basketball fans seem to  think women's basketball was "invented" by some confluence of Title IX, Pat Summitt, Nancy Lieberman, and the Olympics. This could not be further from the truth. The WNBA itself is new, yes. But a few scant months separate basketball's invention from women embracing it. In the grand scope of history, women have been balling since balling was a thing you could do.

After listening to that "Around The Rim" episode, I read everything I could on the history of women's basketball. There is so much beauty and history. SO MUCH. And we, as fans, have not done right by that history. We can use it, we can reach back to move forward. As part of a larger overall picture, we can use the beauty and courage of past generations and honor them by planting a flag, one of many that we need, but an essential part, of growing this game we love.

The aforementioned "The First Women's College Basketball Game" is essential. But also: read Lydia Reeder's "Dust Bowl Girls" and David McElwain's "The Only Dance In Iowa" and probably most importantly Pamela Grundy and Susan Shackelford's "Shattering The Glass" and there is a deep, rich, and rewarding exegesis of women's hoops going back well over a century.

The fans have been there from the beginning. They walked miles over dirt track roads in the dead cold of Midwestern winters to scream their throats raw for the young women on the court playing highs school ball on Friday nights. The gyms were heated by wood stoves, sometimes set in the middle of the actual playing floor; sometimes placed where they could heat the building while also lurking for unsuspecting opposing players to run into. A true home court advantage if ever there was one. But they came to cheer for women's basketball, for the pride of their home towns, for the game they knew and anointed as the marker of success for their small communities. Because they loved it. Because it was everything; the way local fans have always congregated to their towns and their teams. Reading the accounts of those games, written long before my parents were born, is no different than reading a write-up of any other sports game. High school football in Georgia or Florida or Texas, basketball in Indiana or Kansas. In the days of sawdust floors and tin bleachers, fans were rabid, passionate, dedicated-to-the-point-of-unhinged over women's hoops. The game has always been here. It has always been loved. It has always mattered. 

In the barnstorming era, premier squads packed local civic centers in Philadelphia and Durham and Austin and Dallas. Elite ass-kicking squads of ballin' ladies traveled the country laying waste to everything in their path. It was not uncommon, when a traveling team stopped in a city for a few days' worth of exhibition games against local competition, for the women's team to take on a local men's squad. It was also not uncommon for the ladies to run the men's asses up and down the court and eventually out of the fucking gym.

Throughout all of this incredible and transcendent history, the same bullshit we are still dealing with now was ever present. Organizations rose up to protect the "sanctity" or "modesty" or "propriety" or whatever of women and say that these nice young ladies shouldn't be engaging in the rough and "manly" world of sports. (Gag)

But the game kept on. It has always been a beacon for change. One of the foremost points of pride for most WNBA fans is the league's embrace of activism. But women's basketball has fought those battles literally from jump. The W is fighting for feminism, for the LGBTQIA community, for Black Lives Matter. This is not in any way meant to downplay the significance of those fights, just to say that while tt hasn't always been as soon as it should have, this game has almost always been the first to advocate for important causes for women and POC going way back.

Which brings me to my long-winded point. How can we use this? We are in a fight to protect and grow this game we love, and we have history going back to damn near when the first basketball was tipped and we almost never talk about it. Cant' we make a holistic historical argument here? I understand we have to give professional basketball priority. I understand the W needs our help more because college hoops ain't going anywhere and we have to boost viewership of the W because the league's survival depends on increased revenue to hopefully pay the players what they're worth and get some decent travel channels. I understand that this requires highlighting the current stars of the game. We have a perfect recipe right now. Old vets still kicking ass in DT and Sue, mid-career greats like Maya and Angel ripping it up, and a new generation of Goddesses in Stewie and A'ja et. al. You sell the game on the stars that are there. That's important; it's vital. But I feel like if we showed the world how deep and passionate the history is, how far back it goes, they might sit up and take a little more notice. Why not run ads with faded pictures and info blurbs chronicling important historical moments, all the way back to Senda Berenson in 1892? Why not lobby the broadcast partners for a few E60 segments on Babe Didrikson or Ora Mae Washington (which, on a related note, how the HELL was she only now inducted into the HOF?!?!?!?) If we can show people how great this game has always been, and that there has never been basketball that was not played by women, maybe that would help.

It doesn't solve the myriad problems facing the game. Not close. I'm just asking a question. Would displaying the full beauty and struggle and historical import of women's basketball as a complete entity help to grow the game? And if so, how do we make that happen?

Being Grateful For The Dallas Wings.

A little before noon on January 22, 2017, my wife and I settled into our season ticket seats in Carmichael Arena to watch our beloved Tar Heels take on Muffet McGraw's Notre Dame. The game was a big deal, nationally televised with The Goddesses LaChina Robinson and Beth Mowins on the call for ESPNU. Our seats are across from the visitor's bench, and we could see them prepping and talking during commercials up in the little crow's nest broadcast platform on the opposite wall if the gym. We were giddy before the tip. We knew Carolina were not favored, having gotten off to a rocky 1-5 start in conference play, but 1. never count Coach Hatchell out at home and 2. "let's see if the Irish can back up the hype of this #6 ranking they've got."

Y'all. They did. What followed was four quarters of absolute scorched-earth basketball. The demolition was keyed by the jaw-dropping two-woman game of point guard Lindsay Allen and forward Brianna Turner. They simply took us apart. Pick literally any high-low action you can think of, any set, those two ran 'em all to devastating effect. Everything fueled off Allen and Turner's telepathic connection, the sort that makes great teams so thrilling to watch. By the second quarter, our defense was playing like they had the Sowrd of Damocles hanging over their heads, which, basically, they did. Allen and Turner were a wormhole, a massive cataclysmic force distorting the gravity of the entire court. Once the Heels' D got sucked into that wormhole, the floodgates opened. Allen had an off shooting night (2/7 from the floor) but tossed up 11 dimes and 6 boards to balance out her 5 points scored. Turner ripped off a monster 24 and 12 with 6 blocks. The rest of the Irish finished the job, including 13 points from Marina Mabrey, 10 from Jackie Young, and 11 from Arike Ogunbowale (whom you may have heard of by now). It's brutal to watch this sort of thing happen to your squad, in your gym, but at a certain point you just have to shake your head and laugh. Watching Allen and Turner cook was a mesmerizing, breathtaking experience. Any time you get to see players with that level of on-court chemistry, who know precisely where each other are and what each other will do at all times, it's special.

Enter this season's Dallas Wings, and the sheer delight of watching Skylar Diggins-Smith and Liz Cambage. I tend to adopt at least one other squad besides my team in any sport to kind of follow and root for over a given season, and this year's Wings were a no-brainer. Cambage and SkyDiggs are what would happen if you plugged Allen and Turner into a guitar amp, dimed out all the knobs, and let it rip. (Call it the Allen-Turner Overdrive. *sorry*)

The Wings have had what could politely be described as a tumultuous season. Plagued by truly horrific injury luck and sometimes erratic play on the court, this has been a burdensome and frustrating journey. But through it all, Cambage and Diggins-Smith have been absolute appointment viewing, playing with a collective alchemy of precision, fury, and outright joy that cannot be contained.

Diggins-Smith has averaged 18.2 points and 6.2 assists this season, a deadly combination of scoring threat and floor general. Even when things were at their shakiest (and that's been too often for Dallas this year), she keeps finding ways to push, to keep her team in it, to find the creases in a defense and slot in the pass or slither in to knock down the shot.

Cambage, obviously, has had a year for the ages. 22.7 ppg, 9.7 boards, 2.3 assists, murderous defense, and obliterating plenty of records along the way. (Plus that All Star Game dunk, y'all.) There's no one else like her in the league. Her presence in the paint is like a tank; you can't move her off her spot, and her firepower will put craters in things. Although, no tank ever built could be as agile and, being an inanimate object lacking a voicebox, could not approach her level of banter and smack talk, on-court or off.

The real magic, though, is their complete and beautiful synergy. It's that wormhole-gravity-warping thing. When they're on, your defense is going to be sucked in and then destroyed. And they love doing this to opposing teams. They Love It. They take such pride and enthusiasm in their work; bending a possession to their will and reveling in the wreckage they leave behind afterwards. It's an expression of art and love attenuated to the highest level of talent. And good grief, is it beautiful to watch.

Despite their brilliance, that beauty and artistry hasn't quite translated to wins. Too little depth via injuries, too much onus on the two of them to keep a sometimes struggling team afloat. All of it led to a late-season nine-game losing skid which included the firing of head coach Fred Williams. Dallas looked to be in free fall, their playoff chances thinned down to a sliver of hope. But they had a chance at catharsis and revival on Friday Night against the Aces, who just happened to be standing directly in the Wings' path to the final playoff spot. What happened next was spellbinding.

The short version is 107-102 Wings, securing a playoff spot and wiping away the tumult and struggle of the year in dramatic fashion.  I guess I could write more about the game, but Dorothy J. Gentry already did it so well I'm not even going to try. I'd just embarrass myself. Y'all, just click this link: her piece on that game, this team, and SkyDiggs and Cambage is just gorgeous.

That post-game moment, Cambage and Diggins-Smith in each other's arms, letting out all the frustrations of the year and physically embodying their connection, will be one of the first moments that leaps to mind any time we think back on what has been possibly the best WNBA season ever.  It's all there in that photo; the pain and fight, the strength they've drawn from each other all year, the release. This is why we Watch Them Work. Because The Work can culminate in moments like this, and we are better and richer for witnessing them.

And I'm just grateful right now, y'all. Grateful their season isn't over. Grateful this ride isn't done yet. This off season is going to be a true turning point for the W. The issues of pay and travel, which Cambage, along with many others, has so fiercely and eloquently spoken on all year, may cause her to leave the league if serious headway is not made. (Which, to be clear, it's on the league if they lose Cambage and anyone else who decides they've had enough.) Those conversations are coming. But in this moment, grateful is all I can feel. These two women on a basketball court together just torching opponents in the most brutal and creative of all possible ways have been one of the highlights of the summer. For at least a few more games, we get to watch Skylar Diggins-Smith and Liz Cambage perform their special brand of gleefully destructive magic. Happy final day of the regular season. Let's make the most of it.