North Carolina arrived at ACC Media Days in October boldly proclaiming this season was, as guard RJ Davis put it, “championship or bust” in Chapel Hill. The media agreed, tabbing the Tar Heels to win the ACC and handing them the No. 1 ranking in the preseason polls.

After 7 games, the Tar Heels have failed to live up to expectations. If the year is truly “championship or bust” for this North Carolina team, November trended toward bust. The good news? It’s only 7 games.

It’s probably too soon to panic about North Carolina, which went 1-2 in Portland at their PK 85 event last weekend, the Phil Knight Invitational. The Tar Heels’ losses, to a quality Iowa State team and a very talented Alabama team, both came in tight games, the latter going 4 overtimes. That’s hardly a reason to sound alarms.

Still, North Carolina’s Feast Week performance did highlight two things.

First, even though North Carolina returns the Fatigueless Four of Davis, Caleb Love, Leaky Black, and Armando Bacot from last year’s Iron Five, this is a new season and therefore, a new team. North Carolina’s surprise run to the national championship game last season is in the past, and no one is going to hand the Tar Heels an ACC Championship or a Final Four bid on account of what happened last year.

That seems simple enough, but for veteran teams that have already experienced success, it can sometimes be difficult to remember that each season is its own journey. The burden of expectation can also make it difficult to travel that journey with joy, especially when adversity hits.

Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan, who led the same starting 5 at the University of Florida to back-to-back national championships in 2006 and 2007, told Saturday Road that dealing with the expectation of a championship was perhaps the most difficult part for his team in the second championship run.

“Before the season, my staff and I wrote down all the things that could distract the team. We wanted to know what could get in the way of the team,” Donovan said. “One of the biggest things for us, especially when we hit a rough stretch in the season in SEC play, was living in the moment and playing with joy. It can be hard when you have all this external pressure, everyone telling you how good you are and how you should win. But it’s also hard because you have internal pressure. You have such urgency to win yourself that any small setback feels like a failure. You have to remember to celebrate the special moments in the journey or you’ll get lost along the way.”

In Portland, North Carolina played like a team burdened by heavy expectations. They played without joy and made the types of simple basketball mistakes a team feeling serious pressure can make.

“Just because you’re experienced doesn’t mean that you’re perfect,” coach Hubert Davis said after the Iowa State loss. “I don’t know if experience makes you oblivious to being able to make mistakes on both ends of the floor. I wish that we would have handled it differently, but we didn’t.”

UNC, the 13th-most experienced team in the country, per KenPom, played scared down the stretch of the Iowa State game, turning the ball over on 3 consecutive possessions as Iowa State turned a 7-point deficit to a 5-point win in the span of one media timeout.

Davis is constantly talking about taking the fight to opponents, playing with fire, enthusiasm and a swagger befitting the Carolina brand. It wasn’t there over the weekend, as the Tar Heels inched by Portland on Thursday and collapsed against Iowa State on Friday. Where was the swagger, joy, and passion that underlined everything this team did last March?

“We have to find our swagger as a group,” Bacot said. “There’s different players, and I think right now, we’re really just finding ourselves.”

They also need to find joy.

“Coach Davis is always telling us to play with fire, energy, and enthusiasm. To savor every chance to compete,” RJ Davis said after the narrow win over Portland. “Right now, you can tell it just isn’t there.”

Perhaps there is hope. North Carolina fought hard on Sunday afternoon, falling to Alabama in a 4-overtime instant classic, which saw both teams rally from deficits of 7 or more points in the second half to force an initial overtime, and play nip and tuck overtime sessions until the Crimson Tide made, as Hubert Davis put it, “one more play than we did.”

Davis, though, saw something in his team for the first time all season: the fight and determination of a champion, and he told his team that when he saw heads hanging low in the locker room after the game.

“I walked in the locker room after the game and a number of the guys had their head down and I told them to pick their head up. I’m just as disappointed (as the players) in terms of the final outcome, but I couldn’t be any more proud about the way they competed. I couldn’t be more proud of how we showed the fight you need to accomplish our goals this season.”

The Alabama loss brings us to the second biggest difference between this year’s Tar Heels and last season’s national runner-up.

In just 9 months, North Carolina has gone from the hunter to the hunted.

Last February, when North Carolina had just 1 Quad 1 win and spent the bulk of the season on the bubble, the Tar Heels weren’t the team everyone in the universe wanted to beat. Yes, to some extent, North Carolina always gets everyone’s best shot because they are North Carolina.

But this type of “hunted” is different. This is the “hunted” that comes with being the preseason national championship favorite, not simply a college basketball blue-blood every kid playing the sport grows up wanting to play for or compete against. That type of hunted? It is a different type of pressure and challenge.

Florida guard Lee Humphrey, the NCAA Tournament’s all-time leader in 3-point baskets and a starter for those Florida teams, remembered the pressure of being the hunted as being emotionally draining and demanding.

“Every place we went to play, it was their game of the season. We played Kansas at a neutral site and they outnumbered our fans 2 to 1 and the stuff their fans yelled and the passion they had off the court, just wanting to beat us, that energy fed the Jayhawks all night. It was like that everywhere else, too,” Humphrey, who is now the color analyst for Florida’s basketball on the radio, recalled. He also remembered how Florida dealt with it, especially when adversity struck, and the team lost 3 of 4 games during the heart of the 2006-2007 season.

“We had to create a whole new identity, even though we were the same 5 guys who won a championship the year before. We had to be ourselves, but also accept that who we were now was different than who we were a year ago. Being a champion requires a different energy. It means finding joy out of being the team everyone wants to beat.”

North Carolina can learn a great deal from that Florida team, the only team in 50 years to win 2 national championships with the same starting 5.

Starting against Indiana on Wednesday night in Bloomington (9:15 ET, ESPN), the Tar Heels have another opportunity to embrace the challenge of being great. The Tar Heels, now ranked 18th, play as underdogs for the first time this season. Perhaps that will help. But make no mistake, North Carolina will still be “the hunted” at Assembly Hall and in every game that follows. Without finding joy in this season’s massive expectations, the Tar Heels will continue to suffer.

North Carolina’s ceiling is still the roof, this team isn’t the country’s clear-cut best right now. Great teams flip that switch the second the opening whistle sounds, topping their individual talent with grit. These Tar Heels have great talent, and some grit — but not nearly enough, and not with nearly enough frequency.

“The hunger and thirst has been there in spots,” Davis told the media over the weekend. “I’m greedy. I like it for a full 40 minutes.”

If he gets it, North Carolina’s ceiling is, to quote his Airness, “the roof.” Finding that ceiling? That’s going to require more than what the Tar Heels showed in Portland. It’s going to require embracing the journey of championship or bust, not being burdened and beaten by it.