For each of his four years of college, with the exception of a few stray minutes his junior year, Ashton Gibbs never watched the Final Four or the national championship game. He loved basketball, of course, but there was little entertainment or enjoyment to be had in watching teams compete on a stage on which he believed his Pitt team belonged. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

In 2009, he was far from alone. An April 4 game between North Carolina and Villanova that was watched by nearly 15 million people couldn’t count hardly anyone involved with the Panthers men’s basketball program among its viewers.

The pain of losing seven days earlier against Villanova was still too fresh, but the game itself was also a loud and searing reminder of what could have been. A matchup about which they had dreamt was never going to happen and a team that existed as a metaphorical white whale – or, more accurately, a baby blue one – was forever going to elude their grasp.

For a team that thrived on disrespect, however real or imagined it may have been, North Carolina had taken on an almost mythological quality to some members of Pitt’s 2008-09 team. Not only were the Tar Heels and Panthers among the top five teams in the country for much of that season, they were symbolic opposites, the very (and perhaps literal) definition of a blueblood and the upstart that longed to take such programs down.

When the NCAA tournament bracket was revealed that year, a Final Four matchup between the two No. 1 seeds loomed as a possibility, perhaps even a likelihood. Ten years later, it lives on as a hypothetical, a tantalizing thought of what could have been.

“All I think about is, we should have been in the Final Four,” guard Jermaine Dixon said. “We felt like we were the only team that could have beaten North Carolina that year. I definitely think about that often. It still hurts.”

The matchup would have been a star-studded one, featuring some of the best and most decorated players in the sport that season. Levance Fields against Ty Lawson, their team’s respective engines going at one another. Sam Young manning the perimeter against Wayne Ellington and Danny Green. Then, down low, was the marquee pairing, DeJuan Blair against Tyler Hansbrough, two ferocious, high-energy big men who, together, accounted for 40 percent of the consensus All-America first team that year.