I think I speak not just for our readers but for sports fans around the world when I say that when I need a pick-me-up, nothing quite hits the spot like really satisfying highlight tape, or sometimes even a full game replay, from a team I support — the emotions may never be like the first time, but they’re still going to be there, and still going to be awesome. And sometimes, they can bring you a different kind of joy because you go in knowing the outcome: I can watch this year’s basketball win at the Smith
Center, for example, and my heart can stay out of my throat on rewatch. And one of the great things about sports is that while seasons are long, games are short: meaning that even teams that haven’t had a ton of success in the big picture can and do have individual moments of brilliance that find their place in history and are worth looking back on, sometimes over and over again.
That said, of course UNC Men’s Basketball has been extraordinarily successful and provided us fans with a bunch of candidates for feel-good rewatches. When I put this question to the Tar Heel Blog writers’ room, the immediate answers were all men’s basketball, and all pretty expected picks: both of the Coach K-denying wins in 2022, the last three games of the 2017 NCAA Tournament (just the highlights or last moments, though; the games in Glendale were admittedly not pretty), Tyler Hansbrough’s 27/10 game as a freshman in Cameron (fun fact: on Youtube, the highlights from this game, posted by Tar Heel Tapes, have ~12,000 views. The full game posted by the same account has about 8x more). After posing the question, I went ahead and fired up the full 2022 Coach K home finale on Youtube, just to confirm how good it felt to rewatch, and I can indeed confirm: it’s excellent. Some pangs of sadness, sure, that I don’t feel immediate rage at hearing the names of Blue Devils bygone like A.J. Griffin and Trevor Keels, but that’s dwarfed by just the combined elation of that win and the schadenfreude of denying that program and that coach the send-off he was so egoistically engineering. Maybe I’ll watch that Final Four game after I finish writing this…
Anyways, my perhaps lower-key submission for a men’s basketball rewatch game is the N.C. State game in Chapel Hill in 2017, a game that UNC won by over 51 after taking a 30-plus point lead into halftime. It just feels good to see a game like that in which everything went right, against a hated opponent, punch after punch. You start by seeing two Dennis Smith Jr. passes get pick-sixed and the fun just never stops.
You know what’s another game like that? The 2020 football win against Miami that closed the regular season and ultimately served as the highwater mark of the Mack Brown 2.0 era in Chapel Hill. It might not have been against an in-state rival, nor counted for much in the grand scheme of things, or even played in front of a big crowd, but it’s still truly a pretty euphoric experience to watch Javonte Williams and Michael Carter just get whatever they want from Miami’s defense. They run through them, past them, around them, whatever, all punctuated, of course, by Javonte Williams’ mini-Beastquake. UNC put up 554 rushing yards that day, capping off a regular season that still ranks as UNC’s best offensive season ever.
But honestly, my most rewatched UNC highlights recently have been from baseball. Specifically, Game 1 of the 2024 Super Regional against West Virginia. Mike Monaco’s “Honeycutt launches, left field, GOODNIGHT! Again!” call lives rent-free in my head, and the drama of fighting through an 8-plus inning start by the WVU pitcher and then bringing it home with two 9th-inning home runs is a rollercoaster unlike just about any I’ve seen as a fan of UNC athletics. And that’s just one of about 5 cinematic wins that team had that postseason — the Regional opener against Long Island, a 10th-inning win to advance into Supers over LSU, a 2-1 win to take Supers in which Vance Honeycutt did everything but pitch, and the Omaha-opening walk-off win against Virginia. The pain of the way this season ended is a little too fresh for this year’s games to join those ranks, but I think as that sting fades, moments like Jason DeCaro’s complete game shutout and Owen Hull’s walk-off double to take the Heels back to Omaha might be on rotation as well.
What about you? What’s your go-to, and why? I’d love to have a few more reels to add to the pick-me-up playlist.
