news-record.com

GREENSBORO — The finality of it was more than they could take.

After a year of unimaginable pain, the N.C. State women's basketball season ended Thursday. After a season of searing emotions, Kay Yow's last team saw the most cherished thing it had left ripped from its hands: basketball.

Wake Forest defeated N.C. State 59-54 in the first round of the ACC women's tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum, and suddenly the team that had been through more than anyone could imagine was a team no more. At least not in the classic sense.

Stephanie Glance, the devoted assistant who picked up the pieces of a team shattered by the death of Yow in January, said there will be a bond that will hold the team together forever.

"As they grow older and move on into life, I think they will feel more and more and understand more and more how connected we've been," Glance said of the players and staff who walked off a basketball court together for the last time Thursday. "The things they learned from this and how much character this built in them, the staff and the people who are in the program, yes, we will always be together no matter where we are and where we go in life."

Through the long ordeal, Yow's last basketball team always had each other. Through the heart-wrenching period of watching Yow cling to coaching as a lifeline until she could no longer hold it, through the tears of the coach's final days and the release of emotions over her death and subsequent memorials, the team always had the bond that kept them together.

"There's a different kind of emotion with the finality of this game," Glance said.

State played hard, as it has throughout the long-suffering season, cut a 14-point deficit to three in the final minute and pushed Wake Forest to the brink of defeat before collapsing from the comeback and the long months that preceded it.

Mike Petersen, the Wake Forest coach, stood and watched Glance in the final seconds. A day earlier, he'd told her he voted for her as national coach of the year and considered the job she did this year nothing short of heroic.

"No one in the country, in my opinion, has done a better job of coaching their team, and in the most difficult of situations, as Stephanie's done," he said. "She has done an unbelievable job in unimaginable circumstances and has kept that team together, kept that team playing well and kept those kids focused and enjoying what they're doing. You can't say, 'Hey, I know what you're going through,' because you don't. Nobody does.

"The old cliché of athletics teaching you how to deal with adversity? My goodness, they're the model for that. They've done it with dignity and perseverance."

Near the end of the game, after a season in which the Wolfpack won five times after its coach died, State fought for every second it had left as a team. With time running out inside the final minute, State committed five fouls in a 9-second segment, stopping the clock and sending Wake to the line over and over again. And each time, Glance and her assistants and the players on the bench and those on the floor stared at the clock.

When the inevitable happened and the clock wound down to the end, there was no celebration by the Wake players, no eruption of cheering from the small contingent of fans behind the Deacons' bench, no show of emotion to suggest that Wake had just won its first game in the tournament since 2005 and only the ninth in school history. Petersen turned and walked toward Glance and hugged her at midcourt.

Then the tears flowed as Kay Yow's last team walked off the floor for the last time. They'd talked about this moment, and they'd dreaded it more than they knew. Asked if she thought it would be difficult to go on now without basketball, Glance waited a long time to answer, looking first at her players and then forcing a smile.

"Yes," she said, finally. "Basketball has been the funnel where we can put all our emotions into. We can be together every day. We are the group of people who have a common bond as her team and her staff. So the fact that we could go to practice every day, go on the road trips, be at home, go eat pregame, do those things together through a very emotional time was great support for all of us. So I think it will be very difficult to not have that kind of daily togetherness. It will be very difficult, yes."

The team Yow recruited, the team she crafted under incredible pressure, the team she coached through the ravages of cancer until she could coach no more, followed Glance off a basketball court Thursday, a team no more, yet a team forever.

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