The two biggest sports on UNC’s campus this academic year have already shown us undoubtedly the two worst ways a sports season can end — a walloping by a rival to cap off an absolutely anemic year in football, and a historic-level collapse to an inferior opponent in men’s basketball. Obviously, the way everybody wants their season to end is with a championship, but only one team gets that, and even when you’re lucky enough to be supporting a contender, the odds are pretty well against your happiness.
I got to wondering about this because of the UNC women’s basketball team’s upcoming Sweet Sixteen game against UConn. This is a team that hasn’t lost a game this season, may have the two best players in the sport on the same team, just beat a solid Syracuse team 98-45 in a game that wasn’t even as close as the score, and has a history of leveling up in March. Syracuse coach Felisha Legette-Jack spent a solid chunk of her press conference time bemoaning the fact that her team keeps running into the Husky buzzsaw and saying she’d rather have had a 10 seed to avoid that collision course.
The Heels are currently 28-point underdogs against the Huskies. ESPN’s analytics give UNC a 4% chance at victory, which honestly seems generous. It’s not impossible, but it’s not far from it, that the Heels pull off this particular upset. I’m not expecting them to lose by 50, but I’ll be mildly surprised if the margin is within 20. And if and when the Heels’ season ends, it will already have been a successful season — back-to-back Sweet Sixteens for the first time in over two decades is already nothing to sneeze at, let alone with as much youth and turnover as this team had to deal with. That’s not going to make losing feel any better in the moment, though.
And so I turn the question to you — would you rather a season end with a bang, or with a whimper? Given the unlikelihood of a championship, would you rather see a team lose a game that was competitive to the end or be blown out? The former case is less demoralizing, but also less final — you’d have at least a little bit of “what if” haunting your thoughts and feelings around that team. A blowout feels bad, but there’s also some satisfaction in knowing that a team had reached its ceiling and that there wasn’t really a world in which they advanced further. Obviously, competitors want to compete, so from the coaches’ and players’ perspective, the answer is obviously the former — but as fans who might be able to take a bit of a broader view of things, it’s a little murkier to me. I’m not sure if I felt worse after the 2016 national championship game or after Super Bowl 50 (man, those two games happening within a couple months of each other… a significant number of North Carolinians took a double-fisted gut punch to open 2016), but then again, Super Bowl 50 wasn’t exactly a belting, and it certainly didn’t feel like the Panthers hitting their ceiling.
What do you think? What’s the worst you’ve felt after a loss, or maybe the least bad? I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
