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When Michael Jordan speaks, Carolina fans listen. It doesn’t matter what the GOAT is saying. That was never more true than when Jordan showed up at the Dean Dome to celebrate the North Carolina football team making the jump (get it?) from Nike to Jumpman uniforms for the 2017 season.
It was Senior Night for the basketball team against Duke, so the atmosphere was already electric. Add a sprinkling of the greatest basketball player ever to the mix and you have all the makings of an incredibly memorable night.
Jordan was talking up the football team’s future and probably meant to say that the sky was the limit. Instead of that, though, he said “The Ceiling is the Roof” and that was all anyone needed to hear. Did it make sense? Maybe. Kind of. I guess. Doesn’t really matter, though. Jordan said it so we’re all going to make it our new life motto.
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That motto took on extra life when the basketball team made a deep run into the NCAA Tournament before ultimately bringing home the ultimate prize in the form of a national championship. Immediately, shirts were everywhere touting that phrase. The Ceiling is the Roof! Ceiling. Roof. Banner. Even Roy Williams got in on it once the team returned to Chapel Hill following their win in Phoenix. He said shirts would be saying Ceiling. Roof. Champions. And so they did.
So yeah, Jordan probably didn’t actually mean to say The Ceiling is the Roof, but who cares? It was awesome. If you or I got up there and said something kind of dumb it would definitely not become the rallying cry that The Ceiling is the Roof became. We’re not Jordan, obviously. Even his mistakes are kind of incredible.
The most amazing part of it all is that it’s a little easy to sometimes take Jordan’s closeness to the program for granted. The greatest basketball player of all time shows up at our favorite team’s games because they are also his favorite team. That’s pretty dang cool. This was just another example of that, and even if it didn’t go exactly the way it was planned, it turned into something we can all get behind. That’s a testament to how iconic everything Michael Jordan does still is to this day.