Williams’ past meets present

It was early Monday afternoon, less than 24 hours after North Carolina’s Final Four meeting with Kansas was crystallized with the Jayhawks’ escape in the Midwest regional final.

Still, Tar Heels coach Roy Williams already was handling the umpteenth inquiry about facing his former school for the first time since leaving Lawrence, Kan., in 2003.

“I’m hopeful it will die down,” Williams said with a sigh. “I can only say the same thing so many times.”

Good luck with that. Even in the first semifinals to feature four No. 1 seeds, a dominant angle this week remains the meeting of two schools tied together by a coach who has led both to multiple Final Fours this decade.

It hardly matters that none of Williams’ players remain on the Jayhawks (35-3), who will meet the Tar Heels (36-2) in Saturday’s second game at the Alamodome in San Antonio. Nor that Kansas has prospered since his departure, reaching three regional finals in the last five years under Bill Self.

Yet, for whatever reason, acrimony remains in some quadrants of the Kansas fandom. Williams had a chance to leave for North Carolina in 2000 but surprised many when he rebuffed his alma mater and his mentor Dean Smith to remain in the Midwest.

Williams took the Jayhawks to Final Fours in 2002 and 2003, the latter trip surrounded by more Roy-to-Carolina rumors created when Matt Doherty resigned a week before the national title game.

Williams famously declared in a interview with CBS after the Jayhawks lost the championship game to Syracuse that he “could give a flip” about what people who desired an answer on his future plans wanted — buttressed a few seconds later in some coarser language — but took the North Carolina job a week later.

North Carolina and Kansas have not met since then, a product of Williams’ desire not to play his former school. The programs were placed in the same region of the NCAA tournament bracket just once in the last four years (2005), but Kansas quashed any chance of a meeting by losing to Bucknell in the first round.

But now that the matchup has arrived, it is a topic that will not go away.

“Fans will make a big deal out of it,” said Self, who left Illinois to take the Kansas job. “When people are upset you leave, and I went through this myself, it’s a backhanded compliment because they didn’t want you to. I’m sure he understands that. It’s the nature of the business. At the core, I would think people are very proud of the time he spent here because he gave this place 15 years of excellence.”

That’s what makes any lingering bitterness unusual. Williams, after all, did reach four Final Fours, collect four conference tournament titles and win more than 400 games with the Jayhawks. Until this year, his Kansas winning percentage (.805) surpassed his work at North Carolina (which is now .816).

And it isn’t as if Williams has trashed the Jayhawks since his departure. He said Monday at his summer basketball sessions in Chapel Hill, N.C., campers can wear the gear of two college teams: North Carolina and Kansas.

“They’re my second-favorite college team,” Williams said. “Those people gave me a chance. … I have too many great memories to consider Kansas a foe on the other end of the court. I said with [a matchup with] Coach Smith, I would hope it would be at the Final Four. That’s the way I feel now.”

It isn’t the first time a Final Four has included the Kansas-North Carolina-Williams triangle subplot — or the second. In 1991, the Jayhawks met the Tar Heels in a semifinal quickly billed as teacher-vs.-pupil and was exacerbated by Smith’s unusual ejection in the final minute of a North Carolina loss. The Tar Heels upended Kansas two years later in the semifinals en route to a title.

Fifteen years later, the schools are back in the same place. But Williams will be on the opposite sideline.

“I definitely care,” Williams said. “I gave some school, some basketball program, some state 15 years of my heart, body and soul. I’m never going to lose that. Some of the best moments of my life were at Kansas.”

Nevertheless, he will have to beat the Jayhawks to achieve an even better moment at North Carolina this weekend.