With all the banners hanging around them — six national championships, 29 regular season titles, 17 ACC Tournament Championships — there was an uncomfortable, palpable reminder that Paige and Johnson had given the Dean Dome nothing.
“We haven’t gotten any in the three years that I’ve been here,” Johnson said that November day, before the start of his final season in Chapel Hill. Before he became an All-American, before he had one of the best seasons in UNC history.
And of course, there was Paige, not too far away. Paige, who had already made a name for himself and was already destined to one day look up into the rafters and find his No. 5 jersey hanging with all of the Tar Heel legends.
Still, on that day before his first game of his final season in Chapel Hill, Paige worried about the legacy he would leave behind him.
“I want it to be remembered as, ‘Man, that 2015-16 team had a great run, and Marcus Paige was leading the way,’” he said. “Not necessarily, ‘Marcus had a great career, and his teams kept coming up short.’”
You could feel that desire as Paige willed his team back into a game it would eventually lose to Villanova, 77-74, on the biggest stage in college basketball.
You could see that hunger when he scored seven straight points with just over seven minutes to go to bring his team within five. The hunger to bring something bigger than himself back to the campus that he’s called home for the past four years. The four years that he’s called the happiest and most fun of his entire life.
When he became second-half Paige for the very last time, scoring 17 points and leading his team back from a 10-point deficit to give them a chance to win it all with just 4.7 seconds left.