When Notre Dame was in the midst of its big run against Carolina, the Tar Heels helped with several turnovers. The Irish were hot and were going to score their points but if the Heels just hadn’t helped out with those turnovers, we’d be talking about UNC as the ACC champions.

Carolina had 13 turnovers for the whole game but six of them came from the 8:44 mark of the second half to the 4 minute mark of the second half – fewer than five minutes. During that time the Heels went from five up to 10 down.

Also during that stretch, Notre Dame hit 11 of 13 shots, including four threes and two layups after turnovers. Meanwhile, Carolina was barely even getting shots on its trips down the court. Tough to come back from that.

This game illustrates how different the game of basketball has become with the ever-growing reliance on the three-point shot. Notre Dame hits 39 percent of its threes normally and the Irish hit 50 percent in this game, accounting for a third of their points. At one stretch during the first half, Carolina was more than matching Notre Dame basket for basket and still failing behind.

Free throws accounted for another third. I know I’m not from the attention deficit generation and I’m probably an old fuddy duddy, but I prefer when a team with the most rebounds and the most baskets wins the game.

The Tar Heels scored nine more baskets and had two more rebounds. But this is not the game we have today. I enjoy seeing the occasional three pointer but when you have two teams taking 44 of them, that’s a bit much.

I need to crank up the VCR and watch an old tournament final I guess – from back in the day when there were eight teams in the league – and Notre Dame wasn’t one of them.