Tar Heels continue to learn with victory over Seminoles

A late-January game against a middling conference opponent makes the smallest of imprints on space and time. For only the final numbers registered on the scoreboard, and the assigned “W” to the victor and the lonely “L” to the defeated, last as testaments to afternoons that don’t pass entrance exams into memory.

Usually. There are exceptions. As there was Saturday afternoon at the Smith Center during an otherwise cursory 78-74 win for No. 15 North Carolina against unranked Florida State, the Tar Heels’ 10th win their last 11 games. It was not the result that imparted something to UNC so much as it was the moments that led to it, far more significant than an expected outcome.

There was the matter, for one, of turning platitudes into practice. Talk into substance.

“Last year, James Michael McAdoo set the tone for everybody,” Coach Roy Williams said in his postgame press conference. “All of a sudden he’s diving on the floor, taking charges. We talked about that at practice one day and said, ‘That’s the biggest thing we’re missing. Somebody’s gotta step up.’ If you step up, everybody else will follow.”

So there was Brice Johnson — who finished with 18 points and a team-high 14 rebounds — thrusting every one of his 228 pounds to the floor early in the second half, spread-eagled on his stomach, just to poke a loose ball back into friendly hands. It would come, eventually, to junior forward J.P. Tokoto, who kissed a runner off the glass and in.

There was sophomore guard Nate Britt, sporting 15 stitches inside his upper lip from a collision Wednesday against Wake Forest, firing off three first-half assists, a sparkplug for UNC’s to-that-point flat offense.

There was Tokoto, minutes later, leaping three rows beyond UNC’s bench to save a loose ball, landing in the arms of equipment manager Shane Parrish and breaking a foldout chair. All because Johnson had dropped down to step up, and now it was Tokoto’s turn.

“A lot of the guys tried to catch me,” said Tokoto, who had nine points, three assists and one thunderous second-half block. “Some didn’t move out of the way, part the Red Sea.”

“I looked back and there were chairs broken, all types of things out of place,” said freshman guard Justin Jackson, who had 14 points. “I probably would have gotten hurt somehow if I would have done that.”

There was the more trying matter of doing something, anything, to stop FSU (10-10, 2-5 ACC) freshman guard Xavier Rathan-Mayes from laying waste to UNC’s hoop. Rathan-Mayes had a game-high 35 points, the most points any UNC opponent has scored in Chapel Hill since J.J. Redick hit the same mark in 2006. He hit two 3-pointers in 18 seconds to cut UNC’s lead to three, 75-72, with 17 seconds left to play. A pair of free throws from Marcus Paige, who had 19 points of his own, washed away his counterpart’s prolific day.

“Boy, I hope I get his name right,” Williams said. “‘Rathan-Mayes’ – is that the correct way? Guy scores 35 on me, I ought to know how to pronounce his name.”

UNC (16-4, 6-1 ACC) knew the names, too, of those who couldn’t join them on the court, a quartet of guards felled by injury. “It stinks seeing our brothers on the bench hurt,” Jackson said. Theo Pinson, the latest Tar Heel to be sidelined, sported a walking boot on his broken left foot. Joel James, a junior forward, would later leave with a left-knee injury.

That left Tokoto and Jackson to play 34 minutes, and the plantar fasciitis-saddled Paige to log 35. Even the svelter Kennedy Meeks, who mustered 12 hard-fought points against the nation's second-tallest team behind Kentucky, reached 30 minutes. Because when a man falls, another man stands up. This is what the Tar Heels needed, what they wanted. And they got it.

“You come to this university to play, and what better way to get more minutes?” Tokoto said. “I feel like that’s every college player’s dream, is to come to a college like this and kind of fall into some minutes. It’s unfortunate that it comes at the cost of our teammates being hurt, but at the same time, it’s basketball.

“You’ve just got to keep playing.”

And so UNC shall, against teams more formidable than their Saturday foe, but enlightening in equal measure. Basketball, evidently, teaches more often than it doesn’t.

“It’s just heart,” Jackson said, little more than an hour after Tokoto had hurdled his bench and Johnson belly-flopped onto the hardwood. “That’s all it is. It doesn’t take any physical skill or abilities to play hard and have a want to win.”

A moral, perhaps, that’s meant to linger longer than a solitary Saturday afternoon.

sports@dailytarheel.com