DURHAM, N.C. — At times, it seemed like a game neither team wanted to win. Duke had a chance to put it away. Did not. North Carolina had a chance to put it away. Did not. Duke had a chance to put it away. Did not. North Carolina finally did, seven lead changes later.
And by the time the Tar Heels started ringing the Victory Bell with two seconds to play, after freshman Will Hardy’s game-sealing interception, they had also put a stranglehold on the division no one ever seems to want to win.
The Coastal Division is North Carolina’s to lose now, having fended off Duke’s final advances, having salted away a lead at Miami a week ago, and while the Tar Heels might not be the best team in the ACC, not that it matters in the Coastal, they may have its best player.
Josh Downs had nine catches for 126 yards, making big play after big play, his final three catches all going for first downs, one on third down, one on fourth. After shaking off an early season injury, he has again become an unstoppable force, Drake Maye’s primary target and safety valve alike, even if the game-winning touchdown went to a tip-toeing Antoine Green in the end zone.
The rest of it was as topsy-turvy as a full season of the Coastal chaos we’re going to miss, with penalties that wiped out touchdowns and reviews that turned incomplete passes into fumbles and quarterbacks running the ball like they were two of the four horsemen in the old single wing. All of that conspired to make every lead suspect, every third down an adventure and left absolutely no one surprised when the last touchdown won, and that in the final seconds.
It was the final whiplash of many in a game that bandsawed back and forth with the same vengeance as these basketball games often do, even if this one was decided with less time remaining than the momentous most recent. Caleb Love’s shot came with 24 seconds to go, Green’s touchdown to seal a 38-35 win with 16 seconds left.
Duke will rue the Very NFL roughing-the-passer call that turned a third-quarter sack into a North Carolina first down that led to an Elijah Green touchdown and flipped a 21-17 Duke lead into a 24-21 Duke deficit. But the Blue Devils had already blown one chance to put the game away at the end of the first half, when they scored late in the second quarter with the ball coming their way to start the third.
They instead gave up a hurried UNC touchdown, failed to score to begin the second half and let the Tar Heels run out to a 10-point lead. Not to be outdone, rather than press their advantage, North Carolina let Duke get back on top. But a penalty wiped what would have been a third straight touchdown off the board, and that left Duke with too small a lead and the Tar Heels with too much time. The Blue Devils again couldn’t lock it down.
All of which leaves North Carolina the front-runner in the Coastal Division farewell tour, almost insurmountably so if the Tar Heels can beat Pittsburgh in Chapel Hill after taking next week off, but even at this moment by default — which Homer Simpson called “the two sweetest words in the English language.”
Who else realistically can make a claim?
North Carolina has the tiebreaker over Miami, Duke failed to amend Saturday night for last week’s loss at Georgia Tech, Pittsburgh has made the same error, Georgia Tech was so bad before those two wins that it got its coach and athletic director fired and the two Virginia schools are about to be relegated to the Sun Belt, where they might be competitive.
The two toughest games North Carolina has left are against the Atlantic, at Wake Forest and at home against N.C. State on Black Friday. But there’s no reason why the Tar Heels — having survived these past two road games — can’t finish 6-2 or better and there’s almost no chance 6-2 won’t stand up atop the division since Miami still has to go to Clemson.
The Tar Heels dragged things out to the very end Saturday night, but they’ll have every chance to put the division to bed long before the Wolfpack comes to town. They might have surmounted turbulence to beat Duke in this one, but the air ahead looks as smooth as North Carolina wants it to be.
