My eight-year-old son sits on the basket beside the Tar Heel bench--the one in front of the risers. His official title is ballboy and sweat wiper but his real role is to get, as one person
put it on Twitter, "SO TURNT UP!!!" In the car on the way to the game, he asked me, "Do you think if we win the students will storm the court?"
They probably will, I told him. And if they do, you should climb up on the basket support and let them go by.
"And then can I go out there?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said. This is not textbook parenting, but in 1992 I stormed the court after the Bloody Montross game and I have never, ever forgotten it.
As time expired and the students started deservedly streaming onto the court, I looked down towards the goal, and there was Asher, crouched on the basket support, simultaneously looking terrified and thrilled. It was 11:15 p.m. on a school night and Carolina had just beaten Duke and the students were storming the court and it was completely obvious that he was never, ever going to forget that moment.
My wife texted me: "Is Asher OK?"
I wrote back: "I think this might be the best day of his life."
As he left the court, Desmond Hubert was crying. "It was such a great feeling," he said. "I've never felt like that, like I'm so happy that I'm crying." He said it with a little bit of wonder, like he couldn't believe that one basketball game could do that to a person.
But it can, and I wrote that down.
With the students still completely covering the court, Jump Around played over the arena PA system, and everyone did their best Danny Green impersonation. It was a purely unscripted moment of joy, and it felt like it might not get much better than that. Except it did, because then played the alma mater, and strangers put their arms around strangers, and everyone shouted the key parts with as much voice as they had left ...