The Surreal Life

Damn.  Long time, no blizz.  So in case you haven’t heard my alma mater won the 2005 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament last week.  I was fortunate enough to be in Chapel Hill last Monday as everything was happening.  Let me tell you, it didn’t suck.

Even now, a week later, I’m still somewhat numb to the whole thing.  No team that I have ever pulled for so strongly has ever won anything, so I’m not quite sure what to do with myself.  I’ve been a Carolina fan since I was in the 8th grade, so I was obviously excited when they won it in 1993.  But I was a senior in high school then.  I’d been accepted at Carolina, but hadn’t started going there yet.  I was happy for them, but they still didn’t feel like “my” team.

This time it was different.  The mood was electric at the sports bar where we watched the game.  I got there at 4:15 or so to save seats for the good folks that would be watching the game with me later in the evening.  I spent most of those first few hours drinking and chatting it up with the folks around me.  Everyone was there for the same reason, and you could just kinda feel that special something in the air.

By the time the game started, the place was packed.  During the next couple hours we were all on a roller coaster of emotions as the game ebbed and flowed.  And then, the payoff.

The time between when the final buzzer sounded and the next morning are somewhat of a blur.  Before you make your jokes, the blur was caused much more by the numbness I was describing than the drinking I had been doing for the previous 7 hours.  The place erupted when we won.  People were hugging each other: friends hugged friends, strangers hugged other strangers, friends hugged again.  I’m pretty sure I was standing on a chair at some point in time and the manager yelled at me to get down.

Franklin Street was everything that you have heard and then some.  It was a sea of people.  It was bizarre.  It was jubilant.  But it was never out of control.  The paper said that 45,000 people crammed their way into the street that night, but it didn’t seem like that many when we where there.  There was much more hugging and high-fiving.  We ran into a lot of old friends.

Though everyone was clearly happy on Franklin Street, it was not a “let’s burn this place down” happy like you might have expected.  In retrospect, I think everyone was feeling a lot like me: stunned.  I was somewhat stunned that we had won it all, and now I didn’t really know what to do with myself.  I suspect many of my fellow revelers felt the same way.

So now it’s all over, and I’m still somewhat stunned.  There were other times in the past 13 years where we’ve had teams capable of winning it all, but we just never quite got there.  I had doubts in the pit of my stomach since the tournament started that this wouldn’t be our year either, but happily I was wrong. 

Congratulations to Coach Williams and this year’s squad.  You had a spelndid season and did us all proud.