After thinking about it, the substitutions were part of the dance that has to be done regarding foul trouble. I’m not going to tout a moral victory here but that was a damn close game, gone are the days when we folded bad everytime. We are in there and in a position to win. We aren’t pushovers any more. We better get them in chapel hill. As frustrating as it was to lose, it was a very exciting game and I enjoyed it. It was my son and nephew’s first state/ unc game and it was like a rite of passage. They now know the joy and pain of what it really means to be a wolfpacker. Their soul has been tattooed.
^Yeah, much to my chagrin I think we have to give the cheating bastards a lot of credit. ‘Dadgum’ (Roy) gets us about every time. Their defensive game plan was very effective, as Lacey started poorly – and I thought he started forcing in the first half. Once Ralston got into foul trouble that was all she wrote, scoring wise, in the first half.
They shot damn near 60% on the night, and a lot of that had to do with Paige, directly. When he wasn’t hitting every shot he took, he set up others in easy positions to score. We didn’t have a lot of answers last night, yet somehow only lost by two points.
I viewed last night more so in the fashion of ‘they won the game’ as opposed to ‘we lost it’. For as bad as we were both offensively and defensively at times, we did some good things. The effort in the 2nd half was outstanding, particularly not giving in when down 12 late in the second half. Hell, Paige hit a 3 to put them up 11 w/ under 4:00 to go and our guys still fought back to within a point, somehow.
While it’s a stinging loss, I think a lot of us here had resigned ourselves to fate in those last few minutes haha 🙂 . Kudos to those kids and the staff for not once giving up on the game. I put zero amount of faith into getting them at the Cheat Dome, but you never know.
