SPOKANE, WA – Unlike in touch football on neighborhood streets or pickup basketball in a kid’s backyard, there are no do-overs in college basketball.

A team can’t simply stop, pull out an imaginary rag and wipe the slate clean, allowing for a fresh start.

You are who you are, warts and all.

But teams can change, improve and even somewhat re-invent themselves. Past NCAA Tournaments have included plenty of storylines about clubs that had mediocre or poor records in December but found the right formula leading to some March success.

North Carolina’s 6-4 start to this season was BleachBit worthy, but its season isn’t over, and in some ways might now just be beginning.

That’s not an optimistic way to look at the Tar Heels’ 94-81 loss at No. 2 Gonzaga on Wednesday night, but it’s probably the wisest and fairest. UNC wasn’t very good for key stretches of the game, which is why it lost, but one doesn’t have to dig with much might to extract things Carolina can and must build on to keep this season from falling into the depths of one of those an icy caves here in the Pacific Northwest.

You see, with Cole Anthony out at least another month and perhaps a bit longer, the Tar Heels have no choice but learn to manage without him. They were 6-3 with him and 0-1 thinking they may get him back right away.

But Wednesday at McCarthey Athletic Center, we saw a UNC team knowing he’s out a while approach a game at the No. 2 team in the nation with some intensity, a bit of resilience, and found a few kernels of hope that better days are indeed ahead, with or without Anthony.

Maybe their coach’s message after the game is something he said to them before the game, and if so, it resonated some.

“You can’t just keep feeling sorry for yourself,” Roy Williams said. “Sometimes you have to draw a frickin line in the sand and say that I’m going to step up and be a man and be a player.”

So who did that?

*Garrison Brooks was 7-for-11 from the floor finishing with 16 points and six rebounds. Brooks is 15-for-21 from the field in his last two games and handled himself much more like the team’s spokesman after this loss.

*This is still a good rebounding team and can be better. The Heels bettered one of the top rebounding clubs in the nation, 35-30, also limiting Gonzaga to just one offensive rebound among its 24 missed shots. And that Armando Bacot played just 14 minutes because of foul trouble suggests rebounding is fairly close to normal for the Heels.

*Freshman point guard Jeremiah Francis took a big step toward becoming this team’s starting point guard – until Anthony returns – by turning in an 11-point, three assist performance in 22 minutes. The offense ran better when he was on the floor in both halves, and his upside is something that can propel the Heels more rapidly than some of the other options at the point.

*Freshman guard Anthony Harris scored eight points in 14 minutes, and it should be noted he and Francis each hit 3-pointers. That’s newsworthy stuff for a Carolina club that entered the game hitting only 28 percent from beyond the arc.

*Andrew Platek hit both of his 3-point attempts and is 4-for-5 from the perimeter in UNC’s last two games. Hey, it’s a start, right?

*Christian Keeling set personal UNC highs with 12 points and five made field goals scoring in manners he did at Charleston Southern, which is why the UNC staff recruited him in the first place. Maybe this was the start of something.

*And, the Tar Heels finally surpassed the 80-point mark. It took them 439 game minutes to do so, but it happened and that number no longer hovers over this team.

Look, Carolina has a lot of issues and some of them aren’t going away.

This isn’t a typically talented UNC team, but it’s shown its parts can play some solid basketball, and that’s with the injury and other challenges it's been dealt. The Heels also have a coach who can pull them through, as well.

Nobody is predicting a Final Four run, and to be frank, a spot in the NCAAs could be a long shot, but none of that really matters at this time. The Tar Heels need to corral the positives and take steps forward.

And who knows, if they do that Anthony might rejoin a team far better suited to make some noise than before his knee went bad.

Do-overs aren’t possible but starting anew mentally and getting better are.