There doesn’t seem much point to it now, more than six months after the North Carolina men’s basketball team lost on a buzzer beater to Villanova in the national title game.
He’s seen the shot itself, a 25-footer from the Wildcats’ Kris Jenkins that broke UNC’s heart. It’s been hard to avoid. But the 39 minutes and 55 seconds before that sequence have gone unwatched. The highs and the lows and the furious comeback — to Williams, there’s no point in wallowing in it.
“It’s just like somebody pulled your heart out and taunts you by shaking it in front of you,” he said at UNC’s media day Tuesday. “But you’ve gotta get over it.”
What Williams has focused on from that night in April are the words he told his team afterwards — to embrace the pain and the hurt and turn them into something.
“I told them in the locker room, ‘Let’s use this as fuel to work harder in the offseason,’” Williams said. “‘Let’s use this as fuel to motivate, use this as fuel to put in that extra time to know that we were that close but we didn’t get what we wanted.’”
Williams’ team for the upcoming season has taken these words as gospel in summer workouts and the first few weeks of practice. The players know they never want to experience that kind of letdown again and are using that and other aspects of the loss as kindling for what they hope will be another successful season.
For junior forward Justin Jackson, it’s talk from others about coming up just short that stays with him the most.
“We had a really successful year as a university when it comes to athletics,” he said. “But to hear we had five teams make it to the national championship but we had three of them win, and to know that we weren’t one of those teams, it kind of hurts.”
