After 71 Smith Center appearances, Armando Bacot finally says his last farewell

What do you get for the 24-year-old college basketball player who has everything on his second Senior Night? Not another jersey. Armando Bacot’s framed No. 5 has been on the wall in the background of every ACC Network interview he’s done this season.

So when the other seniors held up their framed jerseys Tuesday night, all Carolina blue, down at the end of the line, Bacot’s No. 5 jersey was white. There was no point in giving him a second blue one.

“I said, ‘You had to put me on the spot and give me a white jersey?’ ” Bacot said. “They said last year they gave me the blue one, because I had the double Senior Night. But I mean, I’ll take it.”

Bacot’s long and winding career at North Carolina reached its Smith Center conclusion with yet another ceremony, another farewell to a player who’d stuck around longer than anyone in his generation, on the eve of his 24th birthday. Bacot’s legacy is multifold, but at its heart is his longevity.

“It’s been a long road coming,” Bacot said Tuesday night. “I feel like I’ve been here forever.”

Going forward, in this era of college basketball, how many players of his caliber will stay at the same school for four years, let alone the five Bacot was awarded thanks to the extra COVID-19 year? After Tuesday night’s 84-51 win over Notre Dame, Bacot had played almost twice as many games at UNC (162) as Matt Doherty coached (96). His name is splashed through the record book like someone held down ctrl-V for too long.

When he arrived on campus, Roy Williams was still the coach and nobody knew what COVID-19 was. He played for one team that came within a half of a national championship, another that started the season No. 1 and ended it missing the NCAA tournament and another that would have if the season hadn’t come to an unexpected halt.

He started out his UNC career playing with Cole Anthony and finished it playing with Elliot Cadeau, not to mention Cormac Ryan and Jae’Lyn Withers, two guys he’d played eight ACC games against, before they became his teammates this season — and he played alongside so many teammates who left along the way.

“I feel like a lot of kids in my situation would have quit,” Bacot said, pausing to collect his emotions. “It just pushed me to go harder.”

Even with the fourth and fifth 3-pointers of his career, he was short of a double-double on Tuesday with 14 points and five rebounds, a relative rarity for a player with 81 in his career, still chasing Tim Duncan’s 87 for the ACC record but alone in his field otherwise. Bacot has been a performer of such metronomic regularity that the top statistical comparison to his 2023 season on Ken Pomeroy’s site is … his 2022 season.

And Bacot became the single human representation of the NIL era, twice deciding to return to school because — and this is no joke — it was more lucrative to play for North Carolina than in whatever pro league he would have landed in. With his endorsement deals and “Outer Banks” cameo, he was truly a pioneer at leveraging college basketball fame into fortune.

So he stayed. And stayed. And stayed. For 162 games and counting, breaking Kihei Clark’s ACC record on Tuesday, with a visit to Duke and an ACC tournament and a third trip to the NCAA tournament still to come. A child born on the night Bacot made his UNC debut, Nov. 6, 2019 — at home against Notre Dame, full circle — will enter kindergarten next fall.

“Being able to play in this gym, it’s meant the world to me,” Bacot said. “I may not have been the best player that ever played here, I may not have scored the most points, I did grab the most rebounds, I may not have blocked the most shots, but in terms of players, nobody has loved this school more than I have, and it’s something to be proud of.”

Bacot had to wait until his 71st and final home game at the Smith Center — plus one at Carmichael — to fill one of the very few open spots in his trophy case: At least a share of the ACC regular-season title. Over the previous four seasons, he’d watched Florida State and Virginia and Duke and Virginia and Miami stake that claim.

Now, it’s just a question of whether North Carolina shares it with Duke or not, and that will be decided on Saturday. While that moment awaits, Bacot walked off the court at the Smith Center for the final time at 8:51 p.m. Tuesday, with 3:07 remaining in a long-ago-decided game, to a hug from Hubert Davis and applause from Williams, recognition of a career that spanned two generations.

Bacot talked in the middle of last season about putting himself in the conversation with UNC icons like Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm and Tyler Hansbrough, not out of arrogance, but because of his love for the school and what it has meant to him. The question was put to him Tuesday night: Did he think he had done that?

“At a school like this, there’s levels,” Bacot said. “When you talk about Mia Hamm, Michael Jordan, Lawrence Taylor, coach Williams, coach (Dean) Smith — I mean, they’re probably in the VIP room in the back. I think I’m in that next room.”

Wherever the rest of his time at North Carolina takes him now, this prolonged chapter in Chapel Hill, these years upon years, is finally over. Armando Bacot is finally finished with something at UNC.

Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.

Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports