WINSTON-SALEM – You can take this game one of two ways and it’s every bit of a beauty/eye/beholder situation.

Wake Forest ran out to a 26-point lead early in the second half against North Carolina. That dwindled all the way down to seven in the final minutes, which dragged on for an eternity (we’ll get to fallout of that in a minute).

In a glass-half-full vs. glass-half-empty game, all that wound up mattering was the final score.

Wake Forest worked its way past the visiting Tar Heels for a 92-85 win on Tuesday night at Joel Coliseum.

It’s the second straight win for a Wake Forest (16-9, 8-6 ACC) team making up ground from a four-game losing streak that ended January — though despite the losses, three of them by two points, the Deacons never got too far down.

“I think we always had the momentum rolling, even through the four-game stretch,” sixth-year guard Tyree Appleby said. “Our team always stayed up, we came to practice the same way, smiling. That’s what I really love, we just handled ourselves through that adversity.”

There’s a microcosm here about the Deacons handling themselves through some adversity late against the Tar Heels (15-9, 7-6).

Getting back to that eternity at the end: Appleby scored a season-high 35 points, 15 of which came from the free-throw line in the final two minutes. That made him 23-for-28 at the stripe, setting ACC records for makes and attempts.

Those records date back to the early years of the ACC; South Carolina’s Grady Wallace and UNC’s York Larese previously held the makes record with 21, in 1957 and 1959, respectively (the ACC was founded in 1953). N.C. State’s Ronnie Shavlik and Wake’s Dickie Hemric held the attempts record with 26, both doing so in 1955.

“I wasn’t really counting,” Appleby said of his free throws.

And after being told his free-throw line numbers: “See, I didn’t think I shot that many, I thought I shot like 15 or so.”

Oh, and here’s this: Don’t let those overshadow that with 12:45 left, Appleby scored the 2,000th point of his career that’s spanned two seasons at Cleveland State and two at Florida before this one.

Appleby also had a season-high 11 assists, as Wake Forest built its big lead with crisp ball movement and consistent penetration. Nine of Appleby’s assists were on layups or dunks by Matthew Marsh (10 points), Davion Bradford (eight) or Andrew Carr (seven).

“The one time I took him out, they went on a 6-0 run and I had to call a timeout just to get him back in,” coach Steve Forbes said. “Thirty-five points, 11 assists, only one turnover as much as he handles the ball. That’s an incredible night against an outstanding basketball team.”

A game after Forbes called Appleby the second-best point guard he’s ever coached, and a day after clarifying what goes into that calculus, Forbes had more reason to praise this 6-foot, 175-pound dynamo.

“As far as an individual performance, in my memory bank for a point guard, (that was) the best,” Forbes said. “Especially against an opponent like that, with those kind of players. Tremendous.”

This was a throttling from start to nearly finish. UNC held leads of 2-0 and 3-2; Damari Monsanto hit the first of his three first-half 3s to give Wake Forest its first lead, and Bradford — who started for the first time since Wake’s fourth game — converted a three-point play to give the Deacons the lead for good.

That came a little more than three minutes into the game and by the time there were three minutes left in the first half, it seemed the competitive portion of this game was over.

The Deacons used a 14-0 run to go up 24-9 early, and scored 10 of the last 12 points going into halftime for a 47-25 lead.

The 22-point halftime margin made for an easy line to draw back to last year’s 98-76 bashing of UNC in this building. It sure felt like things were headed that way.

Well … until Wake Forest lost some offensive rhythm and spent most of the second half playing at a faster tempo than needed.

That was the struggle for Wake Forest as the game wore on; Appleby could break the press, but he’d reach UNC’s free-throw line before being picked up. The Deacons took high-percentage shots in a lot of those situations; they just missed.

“There’s a fine line. Like, OK, Andrew took a wide-open 3. Damari took a wide-open 3. Bobi (Klintman) went in there and tried to dunk it,” Forbes said. “Ty probably pressed the issue a little too quick. … There was a stretch in there where we just went too fast. And then we stopped getting stops in there, too.”

Appleby took ownership of the tempo-based mistakes.

“I’ve gotta take control of that, that’s my fault,” Appleby said. “We got a big lead like that, I want to control the pace. I told my coaches it was my fault speeding up like that.”

It never seemed all that costly until the final minute, though. Wake’s lead was down to 14, at 72-58, for the under-4 media timeout. Earlier in the half when the Deacons missed 9 of 10 shots, their lead was still 19.

But in that final minute, it shrunk down to an 85-78 lead with 45 seconds left, an 87-80 lead with 32 seconds left, and an 89-82 lead with 25 seconds left.

This is where that glass-half-full vs. glass-half-empty purview comes in.

“I never felt like we were in danger of losing the thing,” Forbes said. “It was just, ‘Can we finish it the right way?’ The fans, I’m sure they wanted to be excited. I wanted them to be excited.

“But it was 92 to 85, we’re going to take it and be happy and move on.”