Charles will be forever famous for dunking Dereck Whittenburg’s errant shot in the final seconds of the championship game against Houston, one of the few last-second shots to ever win a national championship.

“That shot is obviously more recognizable here in Raleigh. There are a lot of huge NC State fans, as well as a lot of college basketball fans and ACC fans that identify with that particular play and where they were the night it happened.

“It's still kind of amazing to me that ... people are still talking about it. I remember when if first happened, I figured I would have my 15 minutes of fame and that would be it. Here we are and it is still a conversational piece. I don’t really think that was the only great Final Four finish that has been played since then, but for some reason people just single out that game and talk about it. Maybe because it was such a David and Goliath thing.

“Whenever I see the play, it brings back memories of the atmosphere, the situation, that last time out, with coach diagramming the play, and me thinking about what is going to happen in the next 10 seconds. I haven't seen it many times, but when I do, it does bring back certain thoughts.

“One thing I will say, a lot of people looked at us as the underdog, but we didn't really feel that way. Playing in the ACC, our mentality was that anybody else from any other conference just wasn't really that good. If you take that same Houston team and put them in the ACC in the 1980s, they would have taken four or five losses. When you play against Ralph Sampson at Virginia, and James Worthy, Sam Perkins and Michael Jordan and players like that at Carolina, when you do that for two months in January and February, by March you have already been playing in that sort of tournament environment for a long time. Unless you are from the state of North Carolina, you don't realize that every single conference game in the ACC is like a Final Four game.”