UNC and NC State didn’t deliver, but Greensboro did on a night that felt like old times

In moments here on Thursday night inside the old coliseum off of Gate City Boulevard, it felt like a great catharsis. A release. If walking into the Greensboro Coliseum during the first couple of days elicited anxiety-inducing memories of 2020, and the world shutting down, then Thursday felt like a renewal. A basketball cleansing. It felt a little like old times. Almost.

No, North Carolina didn’t play along. For that matter, neither did N.C. State.

The Wolfpack faltered late. The Tar Heels folded early.

Their 68-59 defeat against Virginia in the ACC tournament quarterfinals would never be mistaken for a work of art and, when it ended, UNC looked and sounded like a team that was ready for it all to be over. This tournament. This season. These long months burdened by the expectations the Tar Heels created with their magic March of a year ago.

“Really, the story of this year was just talking about last year,” Armando Bacot, the UNC senior forward, said inside of a somber locker room. “... I think it was just an overdue, long hangover.”

Bacot and his teammates didn’t say, explicitly, that they’d turn down the NIT invitation that’s likely coming after what was perhaps the most disappointing season in school history. They didn’t need to say it. Their body language spoke truths, and so did their non-committal answers about the postseason; nobody in UNC’s locker room was frothing at the mouth for another chance to play.

The word Bacot used to describe what plagued UNC throughout the past several months — a hangover — carried deeper meaning. It was applicable to this tournament, too, which for so long had been the ACC’s marquee event, and one of the most anticipated in North Carolina whenever one of its cities played host. It’d been years since we’d seen a tournament day like Thursday.

Maybe not so much for the quality of the games, or even the drama. But for the atmosphere. The noise. The anticipation. All those things that the ACC took for granted for so long whenever the tournament was played in the Greensboro Coliseum, and then missed when it moved the event to Atlanta or Brooklyn or somewhere else.

The 2022 ACC tournament, in Brooklyn, largely played out in anonymity in America’s largest city. Gone was the novelty factor that in some ways fueled the event’s success during its first two trips there; last year it felt like the majority of people walking outside the Barclays Center wouldn’t have known the ACC tournament was happening inside, or even what A-C-C stands for.

The two years before that, 2020 and 2021 in Greensboro, were largely lost tournaments. The arrival of the pandemic forced the cancellation of the first of those; the second played out to completion inside a largely empty arena, spectators spaced out in accordance with social distancing guidelines.

That’s why Thursday was special. It wasn’t the games themselves — only Miami’s victory against Wake Forest included any kind of drama in the final seconds, and the anticipated night session turned dreadful for both UNC and N.C. State — as the community they created. Walking around outside the coliseum Thursday afternoon, it felt a little like it must’ve felt back in the glory years.

There was, for a while, an unmistakable energy. People tailgated outside the arena, or packed the sidewalks wearing the colors of the ACC rainbow. The air filled with the scent of barbecue smoke. Soon enough there was a long line outside of Stamey’s, people in red, Duke blue, Clemson and Virginia orange (almost the same, but different) and light blue.

Undoubtedly, it helped the atmosphere that the quarterfinals included a majority of old-school ACC schools. Only Miami and Pittsburgh crashed the party, and the Panthers didn’t stick around all that long, anyway. The night session was supposed to be the one that delivered, what with a pair of games between longtime ACC foes, and the possibility of a Triangle-and-one semifinal Friday.

Well, didn’t turn out that way, did it?

UNC, outside of R.J. Davis, played about as poorly as it could play throughout the majority of a sleepy defeat against the Cavaliers -- and yet the Tar Heels hung around long enough to provide hope to their supporters. When the result was still in doubt — though one could argue it never really was — the Greensboro Coliseum rocked like it always does during the tournament; like it couldn’t do the last two times it was here.

It was a lovely sound, that noise, even if the game didn’t quite deserve it. The energy carried over, for a while, anyway, to the late game. That is, before the Wolfpack turned in an 18-point dud of a second half, one that turned a three-point game at halftime into a runaway Clemson victory. In the end, those wearing the competing shades of orange were happiest here. In another way, though, it was a victory for the city and even for the conference.

For an evening, it was possible to forget the drama surrounding the ACC, the feeling that the league is under siege; the constant chatter in college athletics these days about revenue gaps and television ratings and “brand value,” whatever it is that phrase means. It was easy to forget about the many foibles of college athletics, the many failures of the NCAA; the many ways the entire enterprise often feels like an exercise in self-sabotage and stubbornness.

For an evening, it felt like a normal ACC tournament in Greensboro, and after the past few years the city and the conference needed it. Even if the games didn’t deliver, the environment did.