UNC basketball finds a way at Virginia — and ending the losing streak was only part of it

Hubert Davis is now in his third season as North Carolina’s head coach and his 12th as a member of the Tar Heels’ staff but before Saturday he wasn’t even a coach at all the last time a UNC men’s basketball team won at Virginia. He was, that long ago, still an analyst at ESPN.

Tyler Zeller, meanwhile, was a long ways away from wearing a headset, as he did here Saturday as part of UNC’s radio crew. He was, back then, the All-ACC center and soon-to-be conference player of the year who made the winning play, late, in that long-ago Tar Heels victory.

Marcus Paige was not a UNC assistant coach but instead still in high school, a season away from his first college season. Roy Williams, now retired for years, was only midway through his head coaching tenure with the Tar Heels.

And the oldest of UNC’s players here Saturday, Cormac Ryan, was barely a teenager. And Ryan, himself, had to think on it in the locker room after UNC’s 54-44 victory — a victory that’d been a long time coming, given the Tar Heels’ semi-annual misery here for more than a decade.

“Man, I don’t even know,” Ryan, 25, said at first when asked how old he was in 2012, which had been the last time UNC had won at John Paul Jones Arena. “Yeah, I was 13. Twelve? Thirteen?”

He wasn’t alone in the uncertainty. It’d been such a long time, the math didn’t come easily.

The last time UNC had won here, in 2012, most of these players were in elementary school.

“I think I was 10,” said RJ Davis, the Tar Heels’ senior guard.

“I was 12,” said Armando Bacot, the fifth-year forward. “So I had to have been in sixth grade, seventh grade? Something like that?”

“In 2012, I was 8 years old,” said Elliot Cadeau, the freshman point guard.

Hubert Davis and his staff did not ignore the history in the days before the Tar Heels’ trip here. They didn’t embrace it, necessarily, either, but it was a talking point, this 12-year stretch of futility on the road against the Cavaliers — this weird streak of futility and frustration.

The Tar Heels had lost eight consecutive games at Virginia. Good UNC teams had lost here. Not-so- good UNC teams had lost here. Its 2017 national championship team had lost here. Its 2016 Final Four team, which nearly won a national championship, had lost here. Several very good point guards had never won here, from Paige to Joel Berry to Coby White to RJ Davis.

And then, Saturday, it was Cadeau’s turn to lead the Tar Heels — who like to run, run, run — into a building where time stands still. Or maybe it’s just the opposing offenses that often do. Every year it’s the same thing when these teams play, the central conflict unchanged.

UNC wants to play fast. Virginia wants to play as slowly as possible. For UNC, it’s like a sprinter preparing to run a race through quicksand. There’s no stopping the slowdown, or the ugliness; the hope is just to make it to the other side with some dignity and, with some luck, a victory.

And finally it came, after so many somber trips home.

“I’m undefeated” in Charlottesville, Cadeau said wryly when reminded of the long line of UNC point guards who’d never experienced what he just had. His assist on a Harrison Ingram layup with 90 seconds left felt like a decisive moment.

At the time, Virginia, whose only lead came at 2-0 in the first minute, had cut UNC’s once-commanding lead to five. The crowd at John Paul Jones Arena, or what was left of it after a prolonged display of particularly painful basketball from the home team, rose to its feet.

The Cavaliers were threatening and they had hope. Then Cadeau gave a little head fake, a subtle no look, and zipped that pass to Ingram, wide open, for the easy score. There was a hush. Virginia cut its deficit to five, again, but came no closer in the final minute.

Ending the streak was one thing for UNC on Saturday but hardly the only goal. The streak had become a quirky nuisance after all, a strange sporting phenomenon, but more important, in the context of this particular season, was for the Tar Heels to re-establish themselves.

They’d been wobbly in recent weeks, alternating victories with defeats, and their lead in the ACC, which they’d built after a 9-0 start in conference play, had evaporated. The Tar Heels approached Charlottesville, then, as if it was a mission essential to their season; as if they had to have it.

“One of the things that we consistently said to each other is, ‘Whatever it takes,’” Hubert Davis said. “On both ends of the floor. Whatever it takes to get through the screen, to box out, to rebound, to talk on defense, dive on loose balls.

“Offensively, whatever it takes to come off those screens, to post up hard, to get second-chance opportunities, to knock down open jumpers, to get to the free-throw line.”

And then he said it again: “Whatever it takes.”

What it took for UNC, on Saturday, was a kind of survivor’s instinct. It took persevering through a 32% percent shooting effort. It took 18 points from Ryan, who scored all of those in six 3-pointers. It took overcoming a scoreless first half from RJ Davis, UNC’s leading scorer, and playing on during that span without Bacot, who sat out with foul trouble before finishing with a relatively quiet double-double of 10 points and 13 rebounds.

“Gritty” is how Hubert Davis described it.

“Nerve-racking,” Bacot said.

“We’re resilient,” RJ Davis said, and he and the Tar Heels seemed content to play in the mud for once. They held Virginia to 27.6% shooting from the field, and the Cavaliers were an unholy 5 for 30 during the first half, when their attempts at generating points devolved into an extended crime against basketball. The Tar Heels had something to do with it.

And now, by virtue of an old-school kind of ACC Saturday, with the top four teams in the league standings playing one another in an afternoon doubleheader, UNC again finds itself in control atop the league. The Tar Heels only found out in the aftermath.

“Duke lost?” Bacot asked, when informed the Tar Heels were back alone in first place, and he nodded and offered a quick smile at the confirmation that, yes, the Blue Devils had lost at Wake Forest. “OK. Well, glad we got the win, then.”

In a cosmic nod to the strange history here, UNC’s 54 points were its fewest in a victory since 2012, and its 54-51 win ... at Virginia. It’d been a long time. Hubert Davis had changed careers and become a coach. Zeller and Paige had traveled their own long journeys. UNC’s players had grown up. The team looked like it had, too.

Davis told his players to savor it until the bus pulled back into the Smith Center. He left here hoping the end of one streak might represent the beginning of another, and he referenced a saying that’s become something of a team motto: “There’s more to be said and there’s more to be done.”