Great Expectations: A Tale of Two Basketball Teams

Hey everyone, and welcome back to The Long Run. After a long journey across the country by car, I finally made it to New York. If you haven’t before and are ever considering it, I’d highly recommend any US citizen to take a road trip across the US at some point. The exposure to vastly different geographic features, cultures, and people from all walks of life is not only interesting, but valuable to put life in perspective. Sometimes we spend so much of our lives in one place (or type of place, like big cities) that we forget just how massive, different, and beautiful this country is. In any case, it’s good to be back and starting life in a new place.

If you like this article, you can subscribe below!

You can also check out my previous posts here and follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Let’s hop into it.

A story about UNC basketball

Let’s talk about college basketball. Specifically, we’re going dive into the 2021-22 UNC basketball team (two seasons ago) and the 2022-23 team (last season).

In 2021, UNC was in a rebuilding year. Roy Williams finished his last season the year before, and the talk all across campus was surrounding the new head coach, Hubert Davis. Some people thought he would take a few years to adapt, while others said that he didn’t have the chops to lead the team, following in the shoes of one of the greatest basketball coaches of all-time.

After struggling through the regular season and conference play, UNC finished the season unranked and managed to land an 8 seed in the NCAA tournament (if you’re not familiar with college basketball, an 8 seed for UNC is mediocre at best).

But then something incredible happened. The team got hot, they upset the defending champions, Baylor, in the second round, and cruised all the way to the Final Four, where they would meet their biggest rival, Duke.

And this wasn’t just any game, this would be the last game ever for the famous Coach K of Duke. In a nail-biter of a game, UNC prevailed yet again, and they were on to the National Championship.

As a UNC fan, I can tell you that I was never more excited in my life.

In the National Championship, UNC was up by 12 points at halftime but blew that lead to ultimately lose to Kansas. However, given the expectations going into the season, this was quite possibly one of the greatest runs we ever saw as fans. Despite the loss, we were satisfied with how the team exceeded our expectations.

Now let’s contrast that to the 2022-23 season. Nearly the entire team from the previous year was returning for the Heels. We had our best player, Armando Bacot, projected to be the National Player of the Year, we were ranked the preseason #1 team, and we were the clear favorite to win it all.

Everyone was saying “Run It Back,” and anything short of a National Title would’ve been disappointing.

Needless to say, expectations were HIGH.

And then everything went to crap. The pressure was on, and it showed. Despite returning 4 out of 5 starters, the team just didn’t fit well together.

The team struggled through the entire regular season and could never really pull it together. “Give it time,” we all told ourselves, but unfortunately that time never came. By the end of the season, we didn’t even make the NCAA tournament.

The thought of playing in the NIT Tournament (where the teams who don’t make the big dance go) hurt so much that the team refused to even play in it. How embarrassing this was as a fan.

The interesting part about this whole story is that the team wasn’t all that different in either season. Same coach, mostly same roster, and even the final records at the end of the regular season weren’t too far apart (24 wins and 9 losses in the 2021-22 season, and 20 wins and 13 losses in the 2022-23 season).

And there were certainly, by the numbers, seasons that were far worse and far better than these two seasons.

But as a Carolina basketball fan, these two years go down in memory as the best and worst seasons ever.

Like most things in life, our happiness comes down to the difference between reality and expectations.

The illusion of happiness

Now let’s zoom out. In a society where everything seems to have become more fast-paced, we see common patterns of things we’re chasing.

Success. Money. Prestige. Admiration from others. And often, we tell ourselves, some combination of each of those things will lead to this elusive goal of happiness.

What is happiness? Well, people have been trying to figure that out for thousands of years.

But what if happiness is not the answer we should really be seeking?

Happiness is a miserable goal sold to people. What we should really be striving for is contentment.

Happiness is a seductive concept. It promises unending joy & fulfillment, but since it’s only temporary, it can be sustained forever.

Happiness itself is not a bad thing, but the pursuit of it can be problematic. We’ve talked about before how the best measure of happiness is reality minus expectations.

Happiness = reality - expectations

The problem with pursuing happiness is that we inherently increase our expectations by pursuing it, which leads to a never-ending cycle of chasing a bar that keeps getting higher and higher.

Like a basketball team who blows everyone’s minds one year and is expected to be the greatest team of all time the following year, the expectations bar will continue to rise indefinitely.

On the flip side, contentment is at its strongest when expectations and reality are in balance. It’s the state of being satisfied with what we have and finding joy in the present moment.

Sometimes being discontent can be a good thing – ambition is what drives us to do and create amazing things. But ambition when unchecked can be dangerous.

Unchecked ambition is the endless pursuit of more. And with an endless pursuit of more comes rising expectations that eventually cause us to break under the pressure, just like UNC basketball last season.

Unintended consequences

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you have big goals and hope to achieve something great. Achieving anything in life – whether that be getting into an Ivy League school, making boatloads of money, starting your own company, finding the perfect partner, or winning some sort of competition – often comes at the expense of another area of life.

The weight of expectations can at times seem so burdensome that it overshadows the reason we wanted to achieve those things in the first place.

Contentment doesn’t require winning. It can be found at the surprise moments of success or in the face of defeat. When we detach our happiness from external outcomes (which are often outside of our control) and instead focus on the journey, we open ourselves up to finding that contentment no matter what the circumstances are.

It’s possible to appreciate what we have and still pursue our aspirations. Sometimes we just have to pause and figure out what the right goals are for us, understand what we’re giving up to pursue them, and not get too overconfident once we get there.

-Owen

Fresh Finds

The First Person to Travel to Every Country Without Flying (Zero to Travel)

Podcast | 72 minutes

A bit of a different Fresh Find this week, but this interview with Thor Pedersen (the first person to travel to every country in the world without ever taking a flight) was pretty crazy. It took him roughly 10 years to finish, and as you can imagine this guy is full of stories, near-death experiences, and interesting learnings as he journeys around the world. There’s also a Part 2 if you like the first episode.

If you enjoyed this piece, subscribe here to receive the newsletter! Once a week, no BS, and sure to make you think.

Also, if you’re interested in starting your own blog or newsletter, check out Beehiiv here!