  We suggest that for QCD in the limit of a large number of colors, N, the
axial U(1) symmetry of massless quarks is effectively restored at the
deconfining=chiral phase transition. If the deconfining transition is of second
order, then the chiral transition is weakly first order. In this case,
metastable states in which parity is spontaneously broken appear at
temperatures below the phase transition. The production of these metastable
states would have dramatic signatures, including enhanced production of eta and
eta' mesons, which can decay through parity violating decay processes such as
eta -> pi^0 pi^0, and global parity odd asymmetries for charged pions. Using a
nonlinear sigma model, in QCD these metastable states only appear rather near
the phase transition.
