While UNC was denied the chance to cut down the nets after the NCAA National Championship game on April 4, first-year Emily Korest trimmed something else for them — four inches of hair.
Korest’s friend Jacky Zheng posted a video on the Overheard at UNC Facebook page the next day, captioned “Local girl cuts hair for national loss (sound on).”
The post was a black and white Snapchat video of Korest cutting her hair into a bucket with a text banner reading “Hello darkness, my old friend” as R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” played in the background.
“It wasn’t really a planned thing. I just never really assumed in my head that we would lose. I had been assuming that we would win this game and that it was our season. I had been banking on it, and I got very upset when we did not, and things escalated,” said Korest.
Like most unplanned decisions in college, the haircut was the result of high emotions and procrastination according to Korest.
“This was 1 a.m. in the Ehaus lounge, and I realized that I hadn’t started a five-page essay that was due at 11 a.m., and I was losing it. There were four of us there who had not done our homework because we were like 'We’re going to win, and then we’re going to be on an adrenaline rush, and we’ll finish it then because this is too much, and we don’t have time to do it now,’” Korest said.
She wasn’t alone in her strong reaction to the game — most students, like first-year Evan Dunn, understood her disappointment, though they didn’t change their appearance for the loss.
“I went to bed, and then I woke up, and I cried. Both of my parents went here, and then my sister’s a senior, so I’ve been a Carolina fan for a very long time," he said. "I wore my dad’s '93 championship T-shirt to try and give us the mojo of that day, but it didn’t go the same way,”
Korest’s own history with UNC basketball is complicated, though she’s now a passionate fan.
