Bryn Renner was ready.

The Tar Heels would get the ball back with probably just under 25 seconds left and have to travel some 40 yards to set up a game winning field goal attempt against NC State on that gray October day in 2012 in Kenan Stadium.

“Offensively, we felt good,” the Tar Heel quarterback from 2010-13 remembers. “We had two good drives in the fourth quarter – one for a touchdown and one for a field goal. We were moving the ball. I was on the phone with Blake (Anderson, the offensive coordinator). We had four plays we called ‘game-winners.’ We liked two of them especially. We were going to attack and get in position for a field goal.”

Casey Barth was ready. The senior placekicker had connected from 48 and 34 yards for six points that day and for the year would make 15 of 19 tries. He and holder Tommy Hibbard went through three or four rehearsal kicks into the kicking net on the Tar Heel sidelines.

“I felt good,” Barth says. “I’d had a couple of good kicks that game. It’s like golf, you hit a few good ones and you’re ready to hit another. To be honest, I was hoping for the chance at a game-winning kick.”

A.J. Blue and the punt return team were ready. So was Roy Smith, settling in on the 30 yard-line to field a punt from N.C. State with 30 seconds on the clock and the game tied at 35-all. Smith, a walk-on receiver, had fielded four punts that day, three of them fair catches, as Gio Bernard was playing on a sore right ankle and limiting his action to offensive snaps from his tailback position.

“Nothing against Roy, but if he’d been back there, it probably would have been a fair catch,” Blue says. “I’m thinking, ‘Okay, let’s do our job, keep them off Roy and give him a clear shot at a fair catch.’ Then get the offense out there and see what happens.”

Then Tar Heel coach Larry Fedora signals for a time out. He gathers the punt return team around him and gives them play call. He wants “Wall Right,” a configuration that calls for half the players to set up a blocking wall to the right of the return man and give him an avenue between the defenders and the sideline, the other half to loop around and clean up any defenders following downfield.

Renner and Bernard are sitting together on the bench. Bernard hears the play call.

“My eyes lit up,” he says. “That’s my favorite return.”

Renner nudges him in the leg.

“Dude, you gotta go. Even if you fair catch it, we gotta have possession,” Renner tells him.

Reflecting back a decade later, Renner says, “Gio gets this look on his face like, ‘Okay, I gotta do this thing.’”

Indeed, Bernard told himself, “Big-time players make big-time plays. I told myself to get out there.”

Bernard stood up, jogged onto the field and nodded for Smith to repair back to the sideline.

“It was fine by me,” says Gunter Brewer, an assistant coach who managed the punt returners. “It’s like giving Michael Jordan the rock.”

Wolfpack punter Wil Baumann was a sophomore averaging 39 yards a kick that year (he would evolve into being an excellent punter by his senior year, when he would average 45 yards a kick). A median kick from a line of scrimmage of the 25 would have taken the punt to the Carolina 35. State’s coverage unit sprinted downfield, and five players had arrived at that landmark by the time Baumann’s punt fell toward the turf.

“What you want to do is kick it high in the air and make him fair catch it, which we had been doing,” State coach Tom O’Brien said, referring to the Tar Heels’ six fair catches on eight previous punts. “You hang it up there so we can get down and cover. That was the idea.”

The best-laid plans, as they say …

It turns out Baumann hits the ball too well and drives it nearly 50 yards. Bernard backpedals to the 26 yard line to field the punt. He now has air between him and his pursuers to make the Xs-and-Os of the schematic diagram work. Bernard darts to the right and, one by one, his blockers knock off one Wolfpack player after another.

T.J. Jiles throws the first block that gives Bernard the cushion to start working against the grain toward the right.

Tre Boston drives his man 15 yards across the field and into another State player.

Romar Morris escorts Bernard downfield and trucks Baumann in front of the Wolfpack bench.

Pete Mangum, lined up on the left side of the Tar Heels’ formation, rushes the punter to make sure there is no fake punt in the works, then circles around and picks off a Wolfpack defender giving chase.

From there it is pure speed and heart and valor from Gio Bernard.

“A perfect wall,” Bernard said. “You can’t draw it up any better.”

Raleigh photographer Jack Morton was on the 15 yard line, between the State bench and the west end zone, aiming his camera to the action just as his grandfather, Hugh, had done so many years ago when Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice was scampering across this same ground. Morton likes the visiting sideline because it’s less crowded than the home side, and for this moment in history he was perfectly positioned.

“Gio came into my view about fifty yards away, rounded the corner and you see the wall form,” Morton says. “You could see this cavernous gap form. You could have driven a couple of trucks through there. I had to try to zoom out as he’s coming at me, and I know I lost him when he swung past me. But that’s okay. The drama was what was coming at me.”

Bernard darted into the end zone along the right sideline and kept sprinting to the wall at the bottom of The Tar Pit, the west end zone student section. Blue was just a few steps behind him, and they were lost in an orgy of noise and pandemonium. The Tar Heels executed a two-point conversion, and the game ended after the ensuing kickoff, Carolina a 43-35 winner and mercifully ending a miserable five-year run of losses to the Wolfpack.

“I had my helmet on, ready to go out on offense,” Renner says. “Gio does that and I launch my helmet into the air. It was the best win I’ve ever been a part of. We got a five-year monkey off our back and we get a walk-off punt return after an electric game with both teams fighting and scrapping.”

“Wow, that was awesome,” Blue says. “I just remember jumping on Gio’s back and everyone else jumped on me. It was chaos after that.”

The Bernard touchdown immediately took its spot alongside Connor Barth’s field goal to beat Miami in 2004, Bracey Walker’s blocked punts in the 1993 Peach Bowl, Walter Davis’s last-second bank shot to force overtime against Duke in 1974 and Michael Jordan’s jump shot versus Georgetown in 1982 as one of the most electrifying plays in Carolina sports history.

“It’s close to my heart, it’s something I know is in the history books,” Bernard says today. “When you’re a kid, you don’t really think about history, you’re just thinking about making the play. It’s like, ‘Hey, I just want to go out and play football.’ It was that way for me until a few years ago when I realized the impact that play had for Carolina football and what it meant. I always want to respect that. Respect the people involved in that play. The punt return people, the coaches.

“Yes, I was the guy who caught the punt and took it back, but there were a lot of guys who made it happen.”

This win over State in Fedora’s first season of his seven-year run as the Tar Heels’ coach was predicated on his incessant emphasis on special teams. Even as the Tar Heels bolted to a 25-7 first quarter lead, even as State reeled off 28 unanswered points, Fedora preached it would come down to one play. And that could well be in the kicking game.

“I said no matter what the score is right now, it’s still going to come down to the last possession,“ Fedora said.

“We all took a lot of pride in special teams, and our unit gave Gio a shot,” Mangum says. “We picked up our blocks and made it happen. Everybody did their job, and we had a nice formation develop. Everyone knew Gio was back there and that we had a shot at this.”

“Special teams were what Coach Fedora was really good at,” Bernard says. “He called the perfect play at the right time. It just opened it up for me. All I had to do was run as fast as I could. It still gives me chills, for sure.”

Ten years later, A.J. Blue looks at a schematic diagram of the punt return as drawn up in the play book. He looks at a video clip on his phone of the play unfolding.

“Hold your guy up, create the wall, then let Gio follow it,” he says. “It was the perfect wall. He didn’t have to make any cuts once he got around it. Everybody did their job. And then you had a one-of-a-kind guy with the ball in his hands.

“Certain people are just built for this type of stuff. If Gio had not torn his ACL his freshman year (in 2010), we would have heard about him that much sooner. He was just one of those guys who knew how to play football, understood it, the physicality of it, everything. To be that size and still be in the NFL 10 years later, it’s unreal. Wow.”

When it was over, State fans stood in stunned silence. Bernard cried sitting on the bench. Barth sought out Baumann, both of them alumni of Wilmington’s Hoggard High School.

“I felt for him,” Barth says. “He’s a buddy and a good guy. We hugged it out and I told him to keep his head up. Sometimes you just hit it so well, you outkick your coverage. Those five yards make all the difference.”

Had Baumann struck a 40-yard punt with good hang time and forced a Carolina fair catch, Renner, the Tar Heel offense and Barth were ready to step in and save the day. But they were delighted to cede the spotlight to Giovani Bernard.