[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10389]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  NORTH CAROLINA'S NATIONAL CHAMPIONS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. PRICE of North Carolina. Mr. Speaker, as a proud alumnus of the 
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I am pleased to join 
several North Carolina colleagues tonight in honoring our amazing Tar 
Heels.
  It has been six weeks since the Tar Heels were crowned the 2005 NCAA 
Men's Basketball National Champions, but the news accounts of their 
victory still paper the front door to my office. My staff tells me that 
nearly every day a Capitol visitor spots the coverage and walks in 
unannounced to say that his or her children want to go to UNC. That is 
music to our ears.
  We know it is not all because of the basketball program, of course. 
UNC Chapel Hill is a fine school with an excellent academic reputation. 
The university consistently ranks among the Nation's top public 
institutions, and last year, it joined Harvard and Stanford as the only 
schools with prestigious Rhodes, Luce, Truman and Goldwater scholarship 
winners.
  It sure is nice to also be among the Nation's athletic elite.
  The UNC team knows what it is to come back from adversity. The 
championship win was especially sweet for North Carolina's three 
seniors, who helped lead an impressive comeback from freshman year 
challenges to the glory of that final game, and we are well aware of 
the challenges next year's team will face without these seniors and 
some other fine players.
  But Coach Roy Williams has led Carolina to victory once, and he is 
going to do it again, with the same spirit and heart and dedication 
that he inspired in this year's championship team. Coach Williams long 
ago established himself as one of the premier recruiters in the 
country, and the talented class of 2006 that he has landed, which 
already includes the number one point guard in the Nation, should give 
us all comfort that the future we are going have is a bright future for 
the men in Carolina blue.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I suppose that tomorrow we may finally take that 
newspaper down off of the front door of my office and put it in a 
scrapbook, but I am not the least bit worried.
  That championship banner hanging from the rafters in the Dean Smith 
Center in Chapel Hill will be there forever alongside the many other 
banners that recount the proud history of one of the most storied 
programs in college basketball, and it will not be long before we have 
new banners to take pride in and more good news with which to paper our 
front door.

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