Chapel Hill Nostalgia

In 1982, when the UNC tarheels won the first NCAA championship of my lifetime, my stepdad and I went up to Franklin Street to watch the celebration.
In 1993, I was in graduate school and watched the game with my Chapel Hill homies in the bare, muddy, and bone-cold Minnesota April
And in 2005, woo hoo, I spent the game alone on the couch in Brooklyn, calling my Mom, Step-dad and brother during almost every commercial break to either share nail-biting panic or goofy cheers.
This one is especially Suh-weet, as we used to say back in the high school days because it's Coach Roy Williams' first win. Maybe it is just because I was raised to be a fan, but I think Dean Smith left the Tarheels with a sort of moral legacy in college basketball. Watching Sean May give that victory speech also reminded me of how much sweeter and more honest college basketball seems that the big money NBA...but when I was living in Chapel Hill, we all knew the basketball players were practically professionals already, that they got perks,etc. However, it is true that Michael Jordan and James Worthy, both of whom went for the NBA draft before graduating, both did finish their degrees in the summer.
How dedicated are Tarheels fans? How obsessive? One of our common practices is to "turn down the sound" on the tv in order to listen to local sportscaster Woody Durham . However, now that Digital Cable has come into use, the 3 second delay that WCHL had added for tv-watching fans, is not enough. My Stepdad told me, "Woody's described the whole play before you see it." They were talking about this all important need to listen to Woody Durham on UNC's student radio station, WXYC, and my Stepdad called up and found out that there is a device that costs $140.00 that will put a delay on the radio to match the TV.
Another measure of Tar Heel Fandom is its universality, its capacity to cross all social borders. Back when I was an alienated punk-rock highschool kid, I recall hanging out at Schoolkids records with some local rock guys and hipper-than-thou record store workers right after Marvin Levi(of "The Veldt") (oh yeah, and check this nice bit about them.) had gotten so excited by the game a few minutes before that he went running out of the store and did a back flip on a car parked on the street outside. I believe, sadly, that was one of those years when the Tarheels didn't win...despite that insane tournament game when Matt Dougherty scored a basket with something like 7 seconds left in the game. Oh Tarheel readers, help me out -- was that the '86 season? Was it the Arkansas Razorbacks that defeated the heels that year?
Well, thank goodness, that didn't happen this year - but it was a close one.
Tomorrow, I will write about real news again, but today, I'm enjoying a little vicarious victory.