CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Tennessee's men's basketball team nearly pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the season so far.
Rick Barnes made it clear he doesn't want his Volunteers to feel satisfied by coming close.
In their first road game this season, they led No. 7 North Carolina for more than 29 minutes, but the Vols couldn't close the deal and Tony Bradley's block of Lamonte Turner's shot in the final seconds preserved a 73-71 win for the Tar Heels in front of 18,745 at the Dean E. Smith Center on Sunday evening.
"It's easy to go into the locker room and say we did this or we did that," Barnes said, "but the fact is we came to win and we didn't, and I don't want them to feel good about being close in games. We've got to figure out a way to get over the hump. We've got to break through. That's what they haven't done yet against an opponent we're probably not supposed to beat."
Tennessee (4-4) certainly wasn't supposed to beat North Carolina (10-1) - the Vols were 20-point underdogs - but jumped out to a stunning 15-point lead and shot 65 percent in the first half.
Robert Hubbs III, the only senior on a team starting three freshmen, set the tone by scoring 15 points and making all seven shots in the first half on his way to a 21-point performance hampered in the second half by cramps.
"Before the game Hubbs was telling us what we've got to do and telling us to stay poised," freshman Jordan Bowden said. "We know they're going to make runs and stuff. We've just got to stay poised and come together."
Tennessee's execution on offense disappeared after the break as the Vols shot just 3-of-13 to open the second half and endured their longest field-goal drought of the game in the final four minutes.
Between those decisive stretches, though, Tennessee impressively answered every time the crowd got loud as the Tar Heels threatened to take control.
North Carolina finally took the lead on Justin Jackson's driving layup with 2:14 to go and held on thanks to vital offensive rebounds in key moments.
The taller Tar Heels scored 25 second-chance points on 22 offensive rebounds, none bigger than Brandon Robinson's tip-in with 50 seconds left and Kennedy Meeks grabbing a missed 3 with 8.9 seconds to go in a 72-71 game.
"We told our team at halftime if we're going to win the game," Barnes said, "we're going to have to do it by rebounding the ball, and we didn't do it."
Turnovers cost the Vols valuable possessions in a game in which the teams never were separated by more than five points in the final 13 minutes.
"We've got to have everybody on the same page and just take care of the ball," Hubbs said. "We've got to treat the ball like it's a piece of gold. We just can't give it to them. We beat ourselves today."
After Meeks split a pair of free throws, the Vols still had a chance to win, but Bradley, who finished with 10 points and 10 rebounds off the bench, erased the opportunity.
"The last play of the game, we didn't execute," Barnes explained. "We had exactly what we wanted. We had the ball in a running start. We crossed over and tried to throw up a shot. In that situation you attack the rim. Somebody's going to be open, and we've got four different outlets there and took probably the worst shot we could take.
"Go back before that, when we had to get a defensive stop - we didn't, and they got a couple easy things."
Said North Carolina coach Roy Williams: "I told Rick, 'I felt like it's the luckiest I've ever been as a head coach in 29 years and 1,003 games.'"
Three of Tennessee's four losses this season are against teams that reached the NCAA tournament's Sweet Sixteen (Wisconsin), Elite Eight (Oregon) and Final Four (North Carolina) last season, and the Vols had second-half leads in all of those games.
Barnes said he won't use his team's youth as an excuse for the inability to deliver in crunch time of close games.
"We just have to have a mentality where we're tired of it," freshman forward Grant Williams said. "We've got to be tired of coming close. We've got to end up winning one of these games. It's depressing to know that we were in the game and we had a chance to win, but we shouldn't be saying that every game.
"We have to come together," he added, "and just establish as a team we're done coming close, we're done being in those games and allowing teams to beat us or beat ourselves."
Contact Patrick Brown at pbrown@timesfreepress.com.