I will never forget the first time I covered Mack Brown as a member of the media.

It was Nov. 16, 1996, and No. 6 North Carolina was playing at No. 24 Virginia. This had become one of the premier rivalries in the ACC because both programs had, as history tells us, their best coaches ever doing their best work at their respective institutions.

George Welsh was UVA’s 63-year-old curmudgeonly coach who turned the once-lowly Cavaliers into the ACC’s most consistent challenger to Bobby Bowden’s national powerhouse program at Florida State.

Not long before, UVA was a joke in the sport. Trust me, I grew up in Alexandria and it was one thing to pound your chest about Terry Holland’s hoops teams, but nobody gave a flip about Virginia football until Welsh got it going in the late 1980s and in 1990, the only year the program was ranked No. 1 in the polls.

Suddenly, UVA football was cool in the Commonwealth and more than a nuisance to the rest of the conference. And for UNC, winning in Charlottesville, once a foregone conclusion, had become a nightmarish proposition.

So, as the day turned into night and the temperatures at Scott Stadium plummeted into the low 40s, Brown’s Tar Heels were doing their thing. They flew around on defense from sideline to sideline, just like the top defense in the nation had done all season. They were physical and controlled the game.

Carolina’s D closed the door on the Wahoos every time they took the field, and on one occasion, Dre’ Bly, who that season became the first freshman in ACC history named a consensus first-team All-America, picked off a Tim Sherman pass and raced (and danced) 51 yards for a touchdown.

So, with just more than 10 minutes remaining in the game, the Tar Heels owned a 17-3 lead and were marching toward what would have amounted to a game-sealing score, getting the ball just inside the UVA 10-yard-line. But an errant pass by Chris Keldorf, in which wide receiver (and 1997 UNC hoops Final Four team member) Octavus Barnes later admitted he ran the wrong route, was picked off by Raleigh native Antwan Harris and returned 95 yards for a touchdown.

Virginia got into the end zone again before Rafael Garcia booted a field goal with 39 seconds left giving Cavaliers a 20-17 victory.

The Tar Heels were devastated.

Somber was one way to describe the Heels afterward. Ticked off. Bewildered. Toss in a few more descriptions for good measure. It ran the gamut.

Of course, the moment was all new to this young scribe, who knew next to nothing about dealing with such situations. Interviewing athletes 15 minutes after losing one of the biggest games any of them had ever played isn’t something one just hops out of bed in the morning knowing how to handle. That stuff takes time, so I had to watch and learn, and I did.

I zeroed in on a pair of legends who sadly are no longer with us. Caulton Tudor (Raleigh News & Observer) and Eddy Landreth, who I believe was with the Chapel Hill News at the time, back when it actually covered UNC, were the consummate pros. There were others, but they immediately grabbed my attention because of how they asked questions and that they did ask questions.

Tough ones. Tough ones to the Tar Heels and to their coach.

Brown answered them, though respectfully. I remember telling my father later that night how struck I was by the manner Brown treated their challenging questions.

But he was clearly not happy and vowed to fix what went wrong.

And he did. A year later, the Tar Heels overcame a 20-3 deficit late in the first half before the defense erupted – yes, the defense – to lead the Heels to an amazing 48-20 victory over Welsh and those Cavaliers. Brown fixed what went wrong and then some.

Now, Brown has been tasked to repair some ills within North Carolina football again. This is a larger assignment than what he faced 22 years ago. He’s different, UNC football is different, and the state and its fruitful bounty are different, and better.

This isn’t a glory days deal, this is for real. Brown is coming back to begin rebuilding the foundation that enabled it to overcome the disappointment versus UVA in 1996 with a dominant performance 10 months later.

Nobody knows if he’ll succeed, but it would be unwise to doubt him.