It Was Chaos: The game that would never end

Notre Dame has turned out some fine priests at the feet of Touchdown Jesus. North Carolina has turned out some fine doctors just across the hospital parking lot from Kenan Stadium.

So why is it, after 120 years of gridiron learning, that these colleges have turned football over to the lawyers?

The question arose around sundown last night, just as the bulk of 60,500 fans started celebrating Carolina's alleged 29-24 victory over Notre Dame. I say alleged because the facts had not been established to the complete satisfaction of referees on the field or invisible judges in the replay booth, and the pursuit of provable recorded facts has become an elaborate farce.

This is what the fans saw in the first flash: a Notre Dame completion that advanced the ball to Carolina's 7-yard line, whereupon the receiver allegedly was tackled or allegedly fumbled. Then either Carolina allegedly recovered the fumble, clinching the win, or Notre Dame had a brief amount of time to go the remaining distance.

The brief amount of time was either one second (the number on the clock) or three seconds (the number many folks noticed as the receiver went down) or four seconds (the maximum number Notre Dame's coach sought). At the peak of this chaos, the Notre Dame quarterback (a possible anarchist) took a quick snap and spiked the ball, which drove the clock down to zeroes and triggered the original Carolina celebration.

Wake up the echoes?

Not in this day and age. Wake up the referees.

Actually, the replay guys woke up the refs and everyone else. The replay guys buzzed down and called everything to a halt, a disturbingly common development in the quasi-judicial quagmire of modern football. The head ref made his announcement -- "the previous play is under review" -- and the fans made their outrage known.

Not that anyone knew exactly what to get outraged about, other than screaming about the obvious conspiracy that some secret establishment fixer would steal something else for establishment sweetheart Notre Dame.

In one end-zone section, a fellow cursed those Big Ten refs. Wrong. They were from the Big East. Besides, the impetus and the eventual decision came from high above the field, where the ACC had placed a so-called technical adviser and a so-called communicator.

Meanwhile, the players and coaches and fans waited. And waited. And waited.

The NHL wouldn't have taken half as long to wipe out a tainted goal. NASCAR wouldn't have taken half as long to declare a dubious winner, knock the other guy back to 18th place and rewrite the rule book, which is written with invisible ink anyway.

The minutes passed. Five minutes? With emotions swirling in the stands -- and not pretty emotions at that -- patience became an elusive virtue.

Cameron Sexton, the Carolina quarterback, sweated through his arm sleeve. "It seemed like an hour," he said.

Tailback Shaun Draughn rubbed his forehead and covered his eyes. "Oh, my God," he said. "It took forever. We had enough time to get a couple of prayers in while we were waiting for that review."

Some players prayed, and some nerves frayed. Butch Davis, the Carolina coach, figured that the Notre Dame receiver, Michael Floyd, tried to lateral the ball and therefore fumbled. Carolina recovered, and that was that. If that wasn't a fumble, Davis reasoned, then Notre Dame, without a timeout, couldn't snap and spike the ball fast enough to preserve one second.

But Carolina had just lost a replay ruling on Brooks Foster's alleged catch, which would have effectively ended the game, and that's how Notre Dame got its last chance.

"Based on the previous experiences during the course of the game," Davis said, "I was not severely, overly optimistic about the potential outcome."

Charlie Weis, the Notre Dame coach, saw an entirely different set of variables.

"Originally," he said, "the call on the field was that it was down, so we had the ball inside the 10-yard line with what we thought was three seconds to go, so our intent was to go up and (spike) it and give us a play designed for that situation."

The technical adviser and the communicator looked at replays and looked at replays. They are real people without a real investment in outcomes, other than trying to get things right. Or so reasonable people assume.

The people out in the stands and in the press box sometimes assume that football has become NASCAR or, even worse, Rollerball, a film about control of sports from a self-interested secret place high above the action.

Eventually, the replay guys told the ref that Notre Dame had fumbled and Carolina had recovered, allowing Carolina to run out the last three seconds. The Tar Heels did just that. The crowd resumed a relieved celebration, the players singing the alma mater in front of the students.

Weis was peeved. "When they went to review, they said that they thought the ball came out before he touched the ground," Weis said. "The guys upstairs don't know about when the whistle is blown, so they're not there, whether the play is blown dead or not blown dead. It's a bitter ending, but it is what it is. They called it that way, and that's it.... I thought they had called him down with what I thought was four seconds to go. I thought that he had called him down, but it really doesn't make a difference what I thought."

Mark Paschal, a Carolina linebacker, thought that cosmic justice had prevailed, not outlaw justice.

"They always get that lucky Irish break," Paschal said, smiling. "I don't know what it is. I was just so thrilled that we caught the last break."

They did, unless the technical inspection over in the hospital garage turns up a different winner today.

■ Lenox Rawlings can be reached at lrawlings@wsjournal.com.