It’s not often that you get to mark when your life is about to change. Typically, the kind of colossal shift to which I am referring happens completely without warning, for good or ill. An unexpected layoff, a car accident, or a winning scratch-off ticket; things that sweep in like a storm and change the world around us while we are left to scrabble for shelter and cling tightly to the leftover pieces of the life we knew before. The quiet voice that each of us carries with us in the back of our mind, the one that we are usually able to ignore, the one that says it can all be rendered unrecognizable in an instant. It must be eerie, then, to be looking directly at that precipice.
I think there are a handful of times that we are given the chance to prepare for a change like this. Going off to school, if that was the path for you, may have been one such time. I vividly remember sitting in the bed of my best friend’s truck after we graduated high school, watching that final summer night before leaving home slide leisurely past as we discussed the future, and all that we wanted to do with it. It’s a rare luxury to be able to identify when that kind of shift is coming. Even graduating college, a short four-and-a-half years later, was less an inflection point for me and more a continuation down the road toward responsible, tax-paying adulthood.
Imagine, then, that you have a chance to decide whether that change is gonna come now or later. After all, Sam Cooke was right—a change is gonna come. But will it be this year?
There’s a whole lot to be decided this offseason. Between the coaching staff identifying transfer portal targets and soon-to-be-former Tar Heels looking for landing places of their own, there’s a lot of figuring happening in and around the Carolina basketball program. Some players are testing the waters at the next level, seeing if they have what it takes to make that change worthwhile or whether they will delay the ever-looming future to run it back for one more year. Some players have the odd luxury of simply knowing that things will change; Armando Bacot, elder statesman and Tar Heel ambassador extraordinaire, has played his last game in that beautiful shade of blue. Now, it’s all prep for the next stage, whatever that may be. Either way, he knows that things will be different next year.
We can also rest a little easier in that same knowledge. Things will be different next year, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. All of the decisions are out of our hands.
Even now, in this uncertain part of the offseason, it’s a great day to be a Tar Heel, and it seems like it would be a tough decision to leave that behind.
