Will Yadusky of Raleigh recently celebrated his 16th wedding anniversary and was tailgating with friends outside Carter-Finley Stadium before the Furman game when he lost his wedding band.
Yadusky said he was working the grill when a rogue hot dog fell to the ground; he immediately grabbed it to throw it in the trash.
"I picked up a molten hot dog," Yadusky said. "The point that I realized that, I just flicked my hands like crazy and hear this sort of pinball ding-dong-dong and realized oh, that was my wedding ring."
Just like that, the symbol of binding love was now loose in the parking lot.
Neighboring Pack fans rushed to help, some pulling up their cars or backing them out of their designated spaces to scour the ground for his ring.
That's when Yadusky said he heard a voice from behind.
"Somebody goes, 'Coach Keatts?!' And I look up and there's the man himself," Yadusky said. "And he's like, 'What -- what are we looking for?'"
For the next several minutes, Yadusky said Keatts, who was on his way to the game, stopped to help, raking the grass with his hands, trying to find his wedding ring.
"He was like, 'You know, I don't know if we can let you go home without finding that,'" Yadusky said. "I was like well, I appreciate your concern, I do."
Yadusky said State's men's basketball coach offered some pointers on the play:
"'Don't think of it as a linear search -- it probably didn't go straight.'"
Sure enough, within seconds after Keatts walked away, there it was, mixed in with the gravel several yards from where it went airborne.
"The fact that he took five, 10 minutes out his day on game day, that was the part that was really meaningful to me," said Yadusky. "I'm excited to know that he is in real life as good as a guy as he seems on TV."
Yadusky immediately tweeted his thanks to Keatts who expressed his relief in a response.