No. 6 North Carolina returns to NCAA tournament

North Carolina is back in the NCAA tournament after a miserable 17-loss season and a line of player defections that threatened to undermine its resurgence.

The Tar Heels (26-7) earned the No. 2 seed in the East Regional and will face No. 15 Long Island on Friday in Charlotte. It will mark the fourth straight time they will open the NCAA tournament in their home state, this time playing about 2 1/2 hours from the Chapel Hill campus.

While they lost to rival Duke in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament championship game Sunday, it sure beats last year when coach Roy Williams was hearing the unusual question of whether the tradition-rich program had done enough to make the NIT.

Williams had won at least one NCAA tournament game for 20 seasons, and his only previous NCAA-less season came in his first as a head coach when he inherited a Kansas program on probation following its 1988 national title.

''I am ecstatic about the making the NCAA tournament field once again,'' Williams said in a statement Sunday night. ''It was kind of hard to enjoy the tournament last year as it was the only time in 23 years that one of our teams had been eligible to make the field and did not.''

The Tar Heels won 19 of 21 games after losing to Texas on a last-second shot, a run that included a win against Duke to clinch the ACC regular-season title outright as well as two straight comeback victories in the ACC tournament. Now they're looking to start another run.

''By now we know what we need to do,'' freshman Harrison Barnes said after Sunday's 75-58 loss to the Blue Devils. ''It's just a matter of, mentally, going out and doing it.''

The Tar Heels have just two players - 7-footer Tyler Zeller and reserve Justin Watts - who have played in the NCAA tournament. This berth comes after a bumpy offseason that followed a run to the NIT final, which gave several young players some needed postseason experience just a year removed from a veteran team's run to the 2009 NCAA title.

First came the surprise transfer of twin big men David and Travis Wear. Then, Williams dismissed fifth-year senior Will Graves, the team's top 3-point threat, just before practice began for breaking team rules. Finally, the Tar Heels were stunned by the abrupt departure of junior point guard Larry Drew II, who left in February just four games after losing his starting job to Kendall Marshall.

Those defections, along with a late-season knee injury to freshman reserve Reggie Bullock, have left the Tar Heels with just eight scholarship players.

Williams said he expected this year's team would improve steadily all season, while he had sounded pleased with the team's defense just about all year. Then Barnes - voted the first freshman Associated Press preseason All-American - started to come around after a slower-than-expected start. He hit a line of clutch late-game shots, including last-second 3-pointers to win at Miami and Florida State.

This late-season run has made a 20-point loss to lowly Georgia Tech in January seem distant.

''Not many people would have thought that when we left Atlanta after the loss to Georgia Tech that we would have won the ACC regular-season championship, played in the ACC tournament final and earned a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament,'' Williams said. ''Now we have to get back to work and play better than we did this weekend in Greensboro.''