North Carolina can move forward, closing one of the most embarrassing chapters in the school's history now the long-running NCAA academic case has ended with UNC facing no penalty.
Still, even with what had to be the best possible outcome - a weight being lifted that has loomed over the Chapel Hill campus for years - school officials greeted the news more with cautious relief than exuberance.
"This isn't a time of celebration," chancellor Carol Folt said Friday in a conference call with reporters.
The NCAA said an infractions committee panel determined it "could not conclude" there were academic violations by the school in the scandal focused on irregular courses featuring significant athlete enrollments.
The school had faced five serious charges - including lack of institutional control - and the possibility of major sanctions such as postseason bans or vacated wins and championships. Yet the case full of starts, stops and twice-rewritten charges reached a best-case-scenario conclusion with the panel's Friday report.
"I think it's important to understand the panel was in no way supporting what happened," said Southeastern Conference commissioner Greg Sankey, the panel's chief hearing officer. "What happened was troubling. And I think that's been acknowledged by many different parties. But the panel applied the membership's bylaws to the fact.
"Albeit at times positions shifted and we were skeptical of positions taken, the panel couldn't conclude violations. That's reality."
Ultimately, the panel said it found only two violations: a failure-to-cooperate charge against two people tied to the problem courses in the formerly named African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department.