Dec. 27, 2008

By Adam Lucas

CHARLOTTE--We've been through this before.

Carolina lost a heartbreaker to West Virginia on Saturday, 31-30. It's a situation the Tar Heels have seen on multiple occasions--in Charlottesville and in College Park and in Atlanta two years ago, among others.

Somehow, though, this one felt different.

After most of those disappointments, the locker room is dismal and smiles are scarce. But there was Butch Davis meeting the media 20 minutes after the game's final play--and the head coach had a smile on his face.

"I told the players in the locker room that there is absolutely no way a program goes to the summit instantly," Davis said. "There are steps you have to take as a program. This week was a big step for our program. Almost no one in our locker room has had the chance to go to a bowl game. Everything is a dress rehearsal for future things to come. There are no insignificant experiences."

If five years from now you look back and remember the Meineke Car Care Bowl as a bitter loss, something has gone dramatically wrong in the Butch Davis Tar Heel football rejuvenation.

If Davis and his core of young talent have their way, we'll remember the 2008 bowl season for two things: Hakeem Nicks's fantastic performance and as a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

Take Nicks first: the Charlotte native played the finest game of his career in front of the home folks, scoring three rapid-fire touchdowns before part of the crowd of 73,712 found its seats. Eventually, the Mountaineers would adjust and send a safety to help on Nicks, but until they made that switch, Nicks was as unstoppable as another receiver who presides over that Bank of America turf, Pro Bowler Steve Smith. Nicks caught tough short passes over the middle. He caught long passes that bounced off defenders. Most memorably, he even caught one pass behind his back, switching it from one hand to the other while circling it behind him.

"I couldn't see the catch, but I knew I had thrown it behind him," quarterback T.J. Yates said. "I just thought, `How did that happen?' The kid is unreal."

You could see the West Virginia defenders asking themselves the same thing; the best reaction to the play came from linebacker Pat Lazear, who simply gazed up at the video board, watched the replay, and put his hands on his helmet while shaking his head in disbelief.

So, despite the defeat, this might forever be known as the Nicks Game. But five years from now, if Davis's plan holds, we'll know it as something else: a foundation.

The last time the Tar Heels played in Bank of America Stadium, it felt like the capstone to something. It was Darian Durant's last game and Carolina was ushering out an important group of seniors. That game was a reward for a group that had survived through a strange couple of years, through epic blowouts and a sudden renaissance.

This time, it didn't feel like an ending. It felt like a beginning. Only one player, Trimane Goddard, remained on the stat sheet from that 2004 team that lost to Boston College in the then-Continental Tire Bowl.

The 2008 squad had new faces all over the field. They'd played in big games and big atmospheres but they'd never experienced bowl week. The plan is for there to be more of these bowl weeks, and perhaps weeks that stretch into New Year's Day. If that's the case, what the Tar Heels learned in Charlotte will become extremely beneficial.

Sure, at the core it's a football game, and they know how to play football. But a bowl is also part circus, and understanding how to manage the circus and the playbook at the same time is a learned art.

"What I learned this week is that it's a balance between having fun and staying focused and practicing hard," Yates said. "Coach Davis has been to millions of bowls, and he did a good job of making sure when we got back to the hotel after some of the fun things we did that we remembered we were here to play a football game."

That game, we now know, didn't end the right way. But before the last lines of John Denver's "Country Roads," had evaporated from the stadium loudspeakers, assistant coach John Blake was already putting the game in a bigger perspective.

"You can't have a testimony if you don't go through a test," Blake told the Tar Heels in the locker room. That logic resonated with Deunta Williams, who as usual was a defensive stalwart.

"You can't tell anybody how to deal with something if you've never been there before," Williams said. "This was our test. Hopefully we'll have a testimony for it next year."

Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of four books on Carolina basketball.