North Carolina Tar Heels Dealing With Tough Memories Off the Court

Yesterday marked one year since the tragic death of UNC mascot Jason Ray. Before the Heels' Sweet 16 game against USC last year, Ray was hit by an SUV as he was walking along a road back to the team's hotel in East Rutherford, NJ. A few days later, on March 26th, he passed away at the age of 21.

Tonight, the Heels enter the Sweet 16 against another Pac-10 school (Washington State) just a year and a day removed from that horrible afternoon.

Ray's memory lives on through the players (and through the lives he then saved as an organ donor). ESPN has done an outstanding job chronicling the stories of those people who live on because of Jason Ray:

According to the Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation, 114 allografts from Jason's tissue have been provided to hospitals across the U.S. and Canada. The recipients come from 24 states, from New York to Hawaii, and range from Harper, the 13-year-old Oklahoma girl, to an 80-year-old Minnesota woman who underwent a fracture repair. Two recipients had their limbs salvaged because of Jason. Four received tissue for a new ACL. Twenty-five recipients, like Williams and Harper, received tissue for spine surgery. And tissue is still being preserved for another 50-70 future recipients.

North Carolina is also mourning the death of Eve Carson, the UNC student body president who was robbed and killed earlier this month. The team has worn a patch with "EVE" written on it as well as t-shirts with the phrase "the world is our dance floor" to honor Eve's love of dancing. The team presented Eve's parents with a team jersey.

"We did what we could," Tyler Hansbrough said. "We know that she pulled for us a lot. We were thinking about her."

"That could happen to anybody," Deon Thompson said. "(She was) the same age as us, and to see the effect it had had on our whole campus, it was a tough thing to see."