Jan. 27, 2007

By Adam Lucas

TUCSON--Listen.

You saw the game. You don't need me to tell you what I saw in Tucson as Carolina completely dismantled Arizona 92-64 on Saturday afternoon.

But let me tell you about what I heard. This was a game about sounds, about intense noise...and thunderous silence.

It is an hour before the game. The Tar Heels' depleted roster is making their way onto the floor. No Brandan Wright. No Marcus Ginyard.

The "Zona Zoo," the name for the Wildcat student section, doesn't care. The sign outside the student entrance says students are permitted to begin lining up four hours before tipoff. But at 6:30 a.m., four and a half hours before the 11 a.m. tip, there's already a healthy line of red-clad students. Soon, they plug in a mammoth speaker, and the bass thumps throughout campus.

Students are admitted beginning two hours before the game. Some try to catch a quick nap. But when the Tar Heels arrive and trickle onto the court, everyone awakens. Every player has to walk through the tunnel nearest the student section as they take the floor. The students lean over the rail--everything they say is clean, but it's obvious they've cultivated an intense dislike for their visitors.

Listen to this:

"Wayne!" screams one guy whose body is painted red. He is wearing a red wrestling mask with green flames and purple suspenders. "Wayne! You are going down, Wayne! Down!"

Ellington smiles. He rocks his arms back and forth and smiles.

"I love this," he says with a wink and a smile, just subtle enough so Mask Guy can't tell he's been heard.

It is a little disarming. You want to pull him aside and explain the situation. Here's the deal, Wayne: you're missing two of your most critical pieces. You're on the road against a team that hasn't lost a nonconference home game in five years. Today's sports section refers to this as the "biggest day of the year on the Arizona sports frontier."

You're not supposed to love it. You're supposed to tremble.

So then Ellington goes out and makes his very first three-pointer and the points start tumbling.

Listen to this:

Every time Arizona narrows the gap in the first half, one of Carolina's big men responds with a basket. No surprise there. That's what the Tar Heels do--feed the post and squash teams into submission.

But these are different big guys. This is Alex Stepheson and Deon Thompson, and every time they score a rowdy bunch of their family members stand and cheer behind the Carolina bench.

This is a testament to the recruiting of Roy Williams. He went into California, into a place where the Tar Heels have never put much effort into recruiting, and found the rarest of college basketball gems: big guys. Talented big guys. Big guys who were willing to spurn the local schools and travel all the way across the country because they believed what the gray-haired coach with the funny accent was telling them.

Throughout the preseason, Williams was asked what he planned to do with all his depth.

All that worrying, all those questions, and now the answer looks pretty simple, doesn't it? What's Williams going to do with all that depth?

Well, he's going to play it.

Now Stepheson and Thompson are close to home for a day and loving it, and their only worry is hurrying through the throng of postgame media so they can share a quick hug with their families. Just a month ago, both freshmen became visibly nervous when they had to speak live on the radio to Woody Durham after a Tar Heel victory. Now they look like veterans, their ties knotted perfectly, smiling and joking with the horde of tape recorder-wielding writers.

Listen to this:

With a minute left in the first half, Carolina has stretched the advantage to 39-23. Ty Lawson works his way into the lane, into a dicey situation with three Wildcats around him. Somehow he wriggles through them, and all you see of him is his right arm lofting the ball against the backboard and dropping it through for a 41-23 lead.

The crowd has already gone from frenetic to stunned. And when Lawson tosses in his spinner, they make this sound: "Awwwwwwuugghhh."

It is as if they simultaneously do not believe what just happened and also believe it all too well.

Listen to this:

By now, the game is well in hand. Carolina leads 67-44 with 9 minutes remaining, and the only remaining drama is the margin of victory. Around this same time, Arizona staffers bring a sheet of paper to the media headlined "Worst McKale Center losses under Lute Olson." The leader is a 12-point defeat to Tennessee. This game has not been as close as 12 points since four minutes were left in the first half.

Danny Green gets the ball on the break and feeds Tyler Hansbrough for a forceful slam dunk. Some aggression comes out in the slam, and the crowd is awed into complete silence by the play.

Suddenly, a noise:

"Thwack!"

Hansbrough has just delivered a high five that would shake Mount Vesuvius to the right hand of Ellington. With the silence, the smack echoes throughout the lower level.

"He had some force behind that one," Ellington will say later, wincing at the memory. "My hand is still hurting a little bit."

Finally, it is over. The two teams shake hands, and each Tar Heel runs back through the same tunnel through which they'd entered the court. Mask Guy is gone. Most of the students remain.

Listen to this:

The sound of every Arizona student leaning over the rail as Carolina left the floor. Not yelling, not any more. Now they were applauding. As Ellington passed, one student in a red t-shirt nods, as if to acknowledge what he had just seen.

"That was why I was saying, `I love it,' at the beginning," Ellington said. "All I could do was smile. I knew we were getting ready to come out, play hard, and show what we can do."

He said it so softly you had to lean in to hear him.

But for some reason it came out like a roar.

Adam Lucas's third book on Carolina basketball, The Best Game Ever, chronicles the 1957 national championship season and is available now. His previous books include Going Home Again, focusing on Roy Williams's return to Carolina, and Led By Their Dreams, a collaboration with Steve Kirschner and Matt Bowers on the 2005 championship team.