CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — This is when the beautiful hell he willingly walked back into becomes real.
And this is when the promise he made his wife—how it wouldn't be so all-consuming this time around—must save him from the road he seems destined to travel.
"I told him it can't be like it was before," Sally Brown says.
Then North Carolina lost to Appalachian State this past weekend, and everything that felt so right for Mack Brown in his second tenure at UNC instead feels eerily familiar.
He's a coach again, all right, at 68 years young.