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CHARLOTTE -- West Virginia waited for the fog to clear to steal the Meineke Bowl from North Carolina, and the Tar Heels were left pondering a season that somehow got away Saturday.

A bowl game for the taking and a year that could've been so much more meaningful was ripped from their hands just when the Tar Heels were beginning to think they could yet make something of a season that held so much promise in October.

With a hometown wide receiver rewriting record books with each catch, Carolina somehow still lost 31-30 for its fifth loss of the year. Both the coaches praised the other afterward, a familiar refrain in low-tier bowl games, and both promised to use the game as a springboard to greater things. But the truth was two 8-4 football programs ran into each other in the Carolina Panthers' stadium, one school got to nine wins and the other didn't.

Each team saw its best player play for the last time, more than likely, and each will start over next season trying to build on what happened Saturday. Butch Davis, the UNC coach who spurned advances from Arkansas earlier in the season, said he would help Hakeem Nicks make a decision about returning to Carolina for his senior season. Bill Stewart, who spent four seasons as an assistant at UNC, said it didn't matter if Nicks stays or goes.

"We're not going to schedule them," West Virginia's coach said. "I don't want to play them again."

Nicks, who said last week he was considering jumping to the NFL a year early, caught seven passes for 210 yards and three touchdowns through three quarters, then caught one pass for seven yards in the fourth quarter of a record-setting day that made the loss all the more hard to fathom.

West Virginia's simple ploy of rolling a safety over the top of its defense on the side Nicks lined up on was enough to stop the Carolina threat. A fumble by the Heels with about eight minutes to play turned the momentum of a game UNC led 30-24, and an interception on the final drive sealed Carolina's fate.

Up until that moment, it seemed likely North Carolina would win the game, get to nine wins and salvage a measure of greatness from a season that held so much more potential early on. The loss of Burlington senior Brandon Tate in the Notre Dame game sent the Heels into a second-half tailspin that saw Carolina lose four of seven games after rising to 16th in the BCS rankings and still come within a week of winning the Coastal Division and playing for the ACC championship.

No one mentioned those things in the tense moments after the bowl loss. That's the nature of bowl losses. Davis said the defeat would help Carolina in the long run, and Stewart said the rest of the ACC should be prepared for a long Carolina run.

"God help the rest of the ACC the next few years," he said.

An ACC season that washed ashore long before Saturday will long be remembered as a year in which as many as eight schools had a legitimate shot at winning. And there was a time when it looked like UNC might be the best of them all. But that was before Tate went down, before Carolina switched quarterbacks, before the numbing losses to almost every school in America with the name 'Virginia' in it and the crushing loss to N.C. State.

It was somehow fitting that Carolina would end up against West Virginia, somehow fitting that the Tar Heels would take a lead and appear headed for a bowl victory, only to see it snatched away late. Once ranked eighth in the nation before running into East Carolina, the Mountaineers would win five straight games in the middle of the season, stumble to the end and happily take a low-tier bowl against a similarly frustrated opponent. That's the nature of low-tier bowl games.

A long line of cars stretched up I-77, presumably all the way back to the West Virginia line Saturday morning, as Mountaineers dropped down from the hills and into the fog. The traffic backed up through the construction out at Lake Norman and the I-85 merge, which emptied the Tar Heels lined all the way back through the wrecks and fender-benders presumably stretching to Chapel Hill.

The clash of programs was the first since 1997, when Carolina defeated West Virginia 20-13 in the Gator Bowl. Almost no memories remain from that thriller.

The history of Saturday's game will depend on the perspective, but the short version is Carolina got a career game from its best player then somehow lost him in the fog, and West Virginia got a career game from quarterback Pat White and stole the game late.

North Carolina's foggy season ended with a fifth loss, and the Tar Heels were left pondering what could've been, a familiar refrain in the ACC this year.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com