Fulfilling a Dream Seeing North Carolina Play in Person

View from my seat

As most of you know my favorite college basketball team are the North Carolina Tar Heels and that it has been one of my dearest wishes to go and see them play in person. Well last night I finally had that opportunity when UNC came to play Stanford ahead of the PK80 tournament up in Portland. I still remember the day about 2 months ago when the schedule came out and I saw that the Tar Heels would be in my neck of the woods, I set a reminder for the day tickets went on sale and managed to get one. Granted my seat on the ticket was up in the bleachers but it was still a ticket and I was ecstatic. I did keep looking on stub hub just in case a better ticket was available and not to high of a price and at first all of the tickets for the section I ended up in were over $150. I happened to check on Sunday to see if the prices had come down at all and they had I found one for under $100 and I got it. I ended up in Section 1 Row B Seat 8, now originally I did think this was right behind the Stanford bench and sadly it wasn't, but the view was amazing.

Lou Campanelli

 One of the other unknown benefits of my seat was that I happened to meet Lou Campanelli a legendary coach on both sides of the country. He coached JMU where in 1973 they took UNC to the wire in the NCAA tournament. He also coached at Cal and was a major force in growing the Pac 12. I digress a little bit though we did have a very lovely discussion about Virginia, JMU basketball and UNC basketball, honestly it was probably the best highlight of the night besides UNC winning and well of course being there.

Back to the game, now it did start off a bit slow with Stanford coming out with a quick lead but once UNC settled down they showed why they are one of the best teams in the country. Joel Berry shook off the rust from not playing and breaking a finger to score a team high 29 points en route to a 96-72 win over Stanford. I really enjoyed being at the game and it was an experience of a lifetime. Now the next game on my bucket list is the UNC vs Duke game at the Dean Dome.

I hope you enjoyed this post and will keep following my love affair with sports.