Just after 10.0 a.m. last Sunday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Vince Carter, having received his college diploma, excused himself from the balance of the ceremonies. Skipping the University of North Carolina's (UNC) commencement address, he left the football stadium and headed straight for the Raleigh airport, where he had a chartered plane waiting to take him to Philadelphia.
Carter arrived at the site some hours before he and his Toronto Raptors team-mates would play the seventh and deciding game of the NBA Eastern conference semi-finals against the hometown 76ers that evening.
The result was a nail-biting, 88-87 affair that came down, literally, to the last shot, which was taken, as fate would have it, by Carter. When his 23-foot jump shot banged harmlessly off the rim, the 76ers moved on to the Eastern finals, and Carter moved to centre stage in a debate that has raged since.
Although Carter scored 20 points, and had nine assists, seven rebounds and three steals in the game, that evening's ESPN telecast began its recap of the loss with the jibe "Graduate fails final exam". At least a few of Carter's team-mates groused that he had been "selfish" in participating in the graduation ceremony on the day of the biggest game of his burgeoning NBA career.
His coach, Lenny Wilkens, didn't exactly back him up, either. Other NBA players questioned his priorities. Among them was Shaquille O'Neal, who missed a regular-season game this year to belatedly pick up his college degree. Had his ceremony coincided with a play-off game, said O'Neal, "I'd have just told them to mail it to me".
A shocking number of American sports columnists also lined up on the wrong side of the issue, although their task was made considerably easier by the fact that that last shot didn't go in; you have to wonder what everyone would have written if it had.
When the NBA conducts its annual draft next month, there will be more players chosen who have never attended college at all than those who have spent their allotted four years at a university - and fewer still who have actually graduated. NBA commissioner David Stern, whose league produces "stay in school" public service commercials aimed at the nation's youth, has conceded that he is troubled by this trend.
Carter was one of a handful of young players with the skill and panache to be considered a potential heir apparent as the NBA searched for a standard-bearer in the lean years following the (second) retirement of Michael Jordan. Like Jordan, he had attended North Carolina, and like Jordan, he had declared for the NBA draft rather than stick around for his final season of college ball.
But Carter had made a promise to his mother, Michelle, when he left school back in 1998. He vowed that he would complete his education, and in the years since he had taken courses during the off-season to complete his degree. Last Sunday morning he stood with several thousand other graduates, in his powder-blue mortarboard and robe, and fulfilled that promise.
When Carter's jet took off from Raleigh late that morning, it is safe to say that most of his Raptors team-mates were still in bed. It isn't as if he missed crucial preparations. He got to the arena the same time most of the other Raptors did. Moreover, after consulting with Wilkens and the team's front office, he had approached each and every player on the Toronto roster and informed them individually, in advance, of his plans.
In the firestorm that has followed his last-second missed shot, though, Carter's side trip to North Carolina has widely been labelled a "distraction".
To put this in perspective, Jordan once found himself similarly surrounded by controversy when he, along with his late father, hired a limousine to take them from New York to Atlantic City for an all-night gambling trip between games of the 1993 Eastern finals. (Mike quickly defused the argument by scoring 54 points against the Knicks two nights later.) Deion Sanders (or rather, Deion Sanders' shoe company) once famously chartered a jet to allow him to play for the Atlanta Falcons in a NFL football game on Sunday afternoon and baseball for the Atlanta Braves in a National League play-off game that same night.
A couple of years ago, Atlanta safety Eugene Robinson got himself arrested for propositioning a Miami undercover detective posing as a hooker the day before the Falcons would play the Broncos in the Super Bowl.
Now, that was a distraction.
In the wake of the missed shot, the retroactive criticism has come fast and furious.
Let's see: Carter was so excited by his graduation that he couldn't have gotten enough rest the night before. Since his original class graduated in 1999, he couldn't have known more than a handful of last Sunday's fellow degree recipients, so why was it so important to be there in person? What if the plane had developed mechanical difficulties, or if bad weather had prevented him from getting back to Philly on time? It was the most important game in the history of the Toronto franchise; ergo, Carter should not have put his team at risk.
If the last shot goes in, of course, all of this is irrelevant and Vince Carter is a hero. Larry Brown, for one, is just as glad it didn't. Brown is the Philadelphia coach - and, ironically, a UNC graduate.
"I had mixed emotions," admitted Brown. "Everybody's going to say he should not have gone to get his diploma, but I thought what he did by going to his graduation was terrific."
So do we.
