Noon on ESPN.

Yeah, not going to be able to get free from work for a second nooner. An extended lunch? Possibly.

The Tar Heels are up today. Never really great chances when you are hoping for the sleepwalking version to show up. A little slow to start after having to wait to play until today.

There’s nothing wrong in acknowledging that UNC is a very good team. One of the best in the country. A likely #2 or #1 seed by Sunday for the NCAA Tournament. They are also prone to forgetting that for large portions of a game.

Instead, a little longer basking in yesterday.

Coach Jamie Dixon really shrank the bench yesterday. Technically 9 players were in there, but Rafael Maia and Sterling Smith played only 3 minutes each.

The game started in fits. The clock issues helped make things disjointed for both teams, but Cuse started getting into the flow of things first. Pitt looked like a team thinking too much. Taking too much time to get moving. Pausing when the ball comes to them.

Players didn’t want to shoot. They knew they were supposed to attack the zone. They have had such success. But, instead they were staying out on the perimeter and not trying to get in the middle of the zone. Artis didn’t want to shoot at first. Mike Young was surrounded. And anyone on the perimeter was afraid to take a 3.

You could see the guards thinking about all the misses in the last two games. The double-clutching. The gears turning. Trying to find that right grip on the ball, only to realize the defender has closed it out.

Then Ryan Luther got in the game and immediately attacked the zone. Not settling for bad jumpers in the zone. Going right to the rim.

The Panthers two best players were underclassmen who came off the bench, redshirt freshman Cameron Johnson and sophomore Ryan Luther. Johnson led the Panthers with a career-high 24 points and had six rebounds, and Luther added 13 points and five rebounds. The Panthers only made two field goals through the first nine minutes until Johnson and Luther took over and combined to score 18 points in a 27-18 run to close the first half. Johnson was 4 of 11 from the 3-point line, and Luther scored twice in the first 59 seconds after he came off the bench.

“I want to come in and bring energy, I want to give a spark,” Luther said. “The one thing we weren’t doing early in the game was getting the ball into the middle against the [Syracuse] zone very well, so I wanted to focus on that once I got in the game.”

Luther really seemed to remind the rest of the front court about what to do.

And then there was Cam Johnson who came in and did exactly what a shooter should do. Shot. No hesitation. No letting the last miss linger. Just the shots taken with a mind uncluttered.

In the second half, Johnson hit two more 3-pointers, added a 2-point jumper and rammed down an emphatic dunk in transition.

“It’s just a basketball game. That’s how you approach it,” said Johnson, whose scoring average increased almost a point after Wednesday’s performance, from 4.3 to 5.0. “If you let the moment get to you, you won’t play as well.”

“Spoken like a coach,” said coach Jamie Dixon, who sat next to Johnson at the news conference. “We consider him our best shooter, the guy we have the most confidence in.”

Back to Artis, who laid down the challenge to Johnson.

“They were keying on me a lot. I was distributing the basketball,” said Artis, who led the Panthers with five assists. “He has to keep shooting. If you don’t, you let the team down. He was hot. Hopefully, he’ll be hot the next game.”

As much as Johnson was there with 4 threes (4-11 outside), it was getting in the paint as well. He was 4-5 inside the arc with putbacks and dunks. Plus 4-4 on the free throw line. He didn’t limit his game. Both he and Luther got in there and moved on offense. And the rest of the team started to as well.

Both Artis and Mike Young did not have bad games. They didn’t have great games either. Artis only took 5 shots — 4 were on the perimeter. Yes, the Orange were paying more attention to him, but he was definitely hesitating in the first half. The performances of the past two games on his mind.

And we still haven’t got to James Robinson saving the season when Pitt appeared to be on the verge of an epic collapse. A sudden Syracuse press, discombobulated them and Syracuse started hitting all their shots late. Suddenly that 12 point lead with under 4 minutes left was gone.

Despite Gbinije’s 3-pointer setting up the dramatic ending, the Panthers held on, providing the normally stoic Dixon with a rare opportunity to display his humorous side.

“Obviously, we would have liked to have kept the (big) lead,” Dixon said, “but we wanted to test some things out.”

That being James Robinson finishing when the game was in the balance.

So it stands to reason that in the final minute of Pitt’s most important game of the season Wednesday, it was Robinson who stepped up and made two big plays against Syracuse. He broke a tie with a steal and a layup, then hit a jump shot in the lane for Pitt’s final two baskets and the difference in a 72-71 win in a second-round game in the ACC tournament at Verizon Center.

“I definitely know that my career is coming down to this last little stretch and I’m not ready for it to end,” Robinson said of his late-game heroics. “We have more games to win. I was just trying to make something happen, really, and it just so happened that it was me that made those plays.

“But I think that if it was someone else who got the steal or who had the shot, I’d have had confidence in them because we really all just have confidence in each other to make the plays we need to win.”

Robinson finished the game with 12 points (more than Artis or Young) and was 2-4 on 3s, as the cap finally came off the basket from long range.