UNC's Heartbreaking Loss May Only Be the Beginning of a Year of More Drama

The freshness of a big moment in sports often leads to statements drenched in hyperbole, but Monday night's college basketball war between North Carolina and Villanova was unarguably the greatest national championship game in at least a decade, probably longer.

Unless you're a Tar Heels fan, that is.

For that percentage of the population, the 77-74 loss to the Wildcats will live on in infamy as a miserably officiated game with a nightmare of a finish.

This team has absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, though. North Carolina swept the ACC regular-season and conference-tournament championships before winning each of its first five NCAA tournament games by a margin of at least 14 points. In a season allegedly devoid of elite teams, the Tar Heels were consistently dominant from mid-November through early April, never losing a game by a margin of more than six points.

They just didn't have quite enough to stop Villanova from its own version of one of the most dominant runs in NCAA tournament history, in which the Wildcats won their final five games against teams that were respectively ranked Nos. 3, 15, 4, 1 and 2 in the January 25 edition of the Associated Press Top 25.

"Over the course of this year, I've thought about [legacy] a lot," Marcus Paige told Sports Illustrated's Brian Hamilton on Thursday. "A lot of guys get lost in the shuffle at Carolina if you're not a part of a championship team."

It's poetically cruel that a senior keenly aware of how much this game meant to his spot in UNC lore would hit the most unbelievable shot.

Scott Halleran/Getty Images

So now what?

This is usually the portion of the program when the team that loses in agonizing fashion moves on by looking ahead to next year.

When Wisconsin lost to Kentucky on an Aaron Harrison dagger in the 2014 Final Four, fans had barely even filed out of the stadium before Sam Dekker and Frank Kaminsky said they'd be back for one more run at a title. And when the Badgers returned the favor by ending Kentucky's perfect season in last year's Final Four, we immediately started trying to piece together the puzzle of NBA draft declarations and unsigned 5-star prospects to figure out how good Kentucky could be this year.

But Roy Williams and the Tar Heels might want to hit the snooze button a few more times and revel in the moment of a fantastic 2015-16 season, because the heartbreaking conclusion to their tournament run is nothing compared to the backbreaking sanctions that may be coming their way.

Let's make one thing perfectly clear before we go any further: There's no guarantee that the UNC men's basketball team will face any sort of penalty as a result of the Wainstein Report—though we can all probably agree it will be a relief when we finally get a resolution to what's been an ominous cloud hovering over Williams, his program and college basketball in general since October 2014.

If you really think the school is just going to get off with a warning, though, take some time this offseason to actually read that 130-page document about the fraudulent AFAM classes. Because when you consider that Syracuse (Fab Melo) and SMU (Keith Frazier) served postseason bans for helping one player remain academically eligible, this little excerpt from page 62 (Impact Analysis Findings) is pretty damning:

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A total of 2,152 individual students who enrolled in the paper classes were included in this impact analysis. Of that number, 329 students (including 169 student-athletes) had at least one semester in which the grade they received in their paper class either pushed or kept their GPA above 2.0. In other words, for at least one semester in their college career, each of those students had an actual cumulative GPA above a 2.0 but a recalculated GPA (excluding the paper class grade(s)) below a 2.0. This number includes 123 football players, 15 men's basketball players, eight women's basketball players, and 26 Olympic sport athletes. Of that number, we identified 81 students who earned degrees from Chapel Hill whose recalculated final GPA excluding the grade(s) from their paper class or classes was less than the 2.0 required to graduate.

"

A few paragraphs later, it states that 14 percent of the men's basketball players enrolled in those paper classes were able to remain academically eligible for the impacted semesters because of those paper classes.

Fifteen players are a lot, but—aside from the claims that former Tar Heel Rashad McCants made months before the Wainstein Report even surfaced—there's nothing in the report to suggest that Williams actually knew what was going on. The NCAA could ultimately decide that he didn't know, he had no way of knowing, and the team shouldn't be punished.

Eric Gay/Associated Press

However, that seems, at the very least, unlikely to happen, and it's part of why CBS' Doug Gottlieb speculated back in February that the 65-year-old head coach with knee and vertigo issues might retire this summer. Williams shot down the idea and called it "sinful," but questions of his retirement plans were incessant during Final Four media week, leading to this comment on Saturday, per Joe Ovies of WRAL:

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I was back there listening to Jimmy's [Boeheim] questions. Jimmy told you to stop asking him about retirement. He said, 'ask Roy.' You have asked me that question five times since I got into town. If I'm going to retire, I think I'll retire in the next two minutes. How good do you think the chances of me retiring in the next two minutes? So don't ask me that stupid question either.

"

No matter how many times Williams refutes it, the question isn't going away until we get a final ruling on the Wainstein Report—which NCAA President Mark Emmert said last week is coming in the "very near future." Likewise, it's not until we know the full impact that we can stop speculating about current Tar Heels declaring for the NBA draft and prospective Tar Heels choosing to instead sign with programs that are more likely to be eligible for postseason play.

Thus, the range of possible projections for the 2016-17 Tar Heels is almost limitless. We know Paige, Brice Johnson and Joel James are gone because they're out of years of eligibility, but that's about all we know.

If everyone who can come back does so for a team that is allowed to play in the 2017 NCAA tournament, North Carolina could absolutely win it. Teams such as Duke, Kentucky and Michigan State are reloading in a huge way, but the Tar Heels could have a starting five of Joel Berry II, Justin Jackson, Theo Pinson, Isaiah Hicks and Kennedy Meeks with quality reserves in Nate Britt, Kenny Williams, Luke Maye and a trio of 4-star freshmen, according to 247Sports. That's not quite 2014-15 Kentucky, but it is a ridiculous amount of talent and depth.

But if May 25 (deadline to pull out of the draft) rolls around and there's still no resolution on North Carolina's 2017 postseason eligibility—or worse yet, if it's confirmed by then that UNC is ineligible—what percentage of that projected starting five either declares for the draft or transfers? And if the penalty is harsh enough, is there any chance Williams sticks around?

After losing on a buzzer-beating three-pointer, we usually expect eligible upperclassmen to return for one more go at a national championship, but there's a distinct possibility that won't even be an option for these guys.

The season may be over, but Kris Jenkins' title-winning shot may have been just the tip of the iceberg of drama for North Carolina.

Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.