When the North Carolina Tar Heels face the Kansas Jayhawks at 8 p.m. Friday in one of the college basketball season’s most highly-anticipated, non-conference matchups, there’s no doubt UNC will have some strong feelings – most notably the craving for revenge.
After holding a 15-point halftime lead, North Carolina lost to Kansas in the 2022 National Championship game. The Tar Heels later had a brief lead under two minutes, thanks to Brady Manek, but the Jayhawks quickly reclaimed their advantage and broke millions of hearts.
There’s still one holdover from that 2022 UNC squad – and he still feels the heartbreak: RJ Davis, the reigning ACC Player of the Year.
“Just to be that close, it was definitely heartbreaking for me,” Davis told TarHeelIllustrated’s Andrew Jones. “A lot of emotions I can remember from that game. I remember looking up at the clock and then watching it hit zero and the buzzer going off. It took a while for the tears to come, but they ended up going right down my face, in terms of a lot of the hard work that we put into it: as a team throughout that year and how we changed that whole year around. It was a tremendous feeling. But to end up short like that was heartbreaking.”
Davis was on that squad with the likes of Manek, Armando Bacot and Leaky Black, to name a few guys. North Carolina almost didn’t make it out of the first weekend, as Baylor rallied from a 20-point deficit itself, but lost in overtime.
The Tar Heels will enter Friday’s matchup with a shorter, younger squad than they had in 2022. Friday will be a true test for how good UNC is, as it faces the country’s top-ranked program.
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