Nobody should be celebrating a loss.
Bill Belichick and the Tar Heels players won't, but sometimes a football team can show you something even when the final score doesn't go their way.
North Carolina did exactly that on Halloween night.
The Tar Heels didn't pull off the upset of No. 1-ranked Miami, but they did something very few people expected them to do.
They went toe-to-toe with the best team in the country.
Miami arrived at Kenan Stadium undefeated, ranked No. 1 and averaging 49 points and more than 550 yards of total offense per game. The Hurricanes had spent most of the season overwhelming opponents with an offense that looked nearly impossible to contain.
UNC wasn't supposed to be able to hang around. Instead, the Tar Heels made Miami fight until the very end.
While the final score will ultimately go into the record book as another loss, the performance itself told a much different story.
This isn't the same UNC football team
Let's be completely serious for a second.
How many UNC fans entered this game expecting the Tar Heels to eventually get blown out?
You can admit it; no one is here to judge you for it. We've all seen this movie before, and after last week's collapse against Syracuse, you had every right to have little faith in the Tar Heels when they welcomed the top-ranked team in the land to Chapel Hill.
Miami landed punches. They scored on their opening drive, and it simply felt like it was bound to be a long night for the guys in Carolina blue.
However, North Carolina kept responding and refused to go away.
Every time the Hurricanes seemed to build a lead, the Tar Heels found a way to stay in the game.
That's progress.
North Carolina shouldn't be satisfied with coming close; hanging tough against the No. 1-ranked team won't earn them a trophy for the effort.
However, the Tar Heels looked like they belonged on the same field as the best team in college football. THAT is progress!
Could we confidently say that a year ago? Heel no.
Honestly, let's just call a spade a spade:
Last year's team gets demolished in a similar setting.
Belichick's first season in Chapel Hill was filled with growing pains. The Tar Heels finished with only four wins and struggled to consistently compete against quality opponents.
This year's group feels different, as this team has been a very competitive unit.
The Tar Heels beat TCU, a team who crushed them on opening night a season ago.
They beat a ranked Pitt team, and followed by beating rival Duke for the first time since 2023.
Even when things haven't gone their way, they've consistently found themselves playing meaningful football deep into games. The losses to Clemson and Syracuse were tough to swallow, since you could easily make the case that this now 4-4 team could easily be 5-2 or 6-1.
Now they can add going toe-to-toe with the No. 1 team in the country to that list.
At some point, that stops feeling accidental and more like the tide is turning in Chapel Hill.
The next step is turning progress into wins
Of course, there's another side to this: progress eventually needs to turn into victories.
North Carolina has experienced the pain of coming close multiple times this season. The Tar Heels have had chances to turn competitive performances into statement wins, only for them to come up just short.
That's the next step for this program.
Belichick has UNC reaching the point where it can compete in these games; now they have to learn how to win them. It's essentially what separates a program that's trending in the right direction from one that is actually ready to contend.
Unfortunately, UNC isn't ready to contend just yet, but they are certainly trending toward getting to that spot in the near future.
It's important for Tar Heel fans not to let the disappointment of another loss erase what happened on Halloween night.
The Tar Heels weren't intimidated by the Miami Hurricanes and certainly didn't get run out of their own stadium.
This group fought, giving themselves a legitimate opportunity to pull off one of the biggest wins in program history.
A year ago, it's hard to imagine UNC doing that.
Losing is never acceptable, but this one just feels different.
The final score says UNC lost the game and came up just short of an upset, but everything else about Saturday night showed just how far this program has come.
Add us as a preferred source on Google