As of Friday afternoon, Joe Sagula’s team had won 15 games in a row.
The North Carolina volleyball team was perfect in ACC play with a 4-0 start to conference competition and hadn’t lost a home game since October of 2011.
A record-high crowd flooded Carmichael Arena, eager to watch the Tar Heels take on Duke, and with an unprecedented 15-0 start to the season, Sagula had every reason to feel confident in his No. 10-ranked team’s ability to defeat the unranked Blue Devils.
That all changed an hour and 24 minutes later.
With the first loss of the season — a 3-0 sweep at the hands of the Blue Devils — that optimism was nowhere to be found.
“They outplayed us, they out blocked us, they out dug us,” Sagula said. “They out hit us, they out served us, they out passed us.”
There was one statistic in which the UNC very obviously outdid Duke — errors.
“We had 28 hitting errors,” Sagula said, letting out a quiet sigh. “We hit .093 (percent) — pretty uncharacteristic of us.”
Those 28 hitting errors were exactly double Duke’s 14, but the .093 hitting percentage wasn’t even half of Duke’s .206. UNC tallied eight service errors, one more than Duke.