Mike Celizic

You can have your glass slippers and your mid-majors and your teams of destiny and your shocking upsets. I’ll take this once-in-a-lifetime moment when opinion and power rankings and polls have collided with reality.

Before the season began, the pollsters, who, as experience has taught us, never get these things right, said that the four best college basketball teams in the nation were North Carolina, UCLA, Memphis and Kansas. Then, before March Madness began, the selection committee said that the four best teams in the country were still North Carolina, UCLA, Memphis and Kansas.

And now, after eight days of battle, there are four teams left — North Carolina, UCLA, Memphis and Kansas.

It’s never happened before and even Bill Gates would go broke betting that it will happen again. Never have even the top four seeds advanced to the Final Four, let alone the top four teams from the beginning of the season right up to the end.

And so, with apologies to George Mason and valiant Davidson, which fell one shot short of breaking up the NCAA’s unprecedented party of power, and all the other teams that tried to stuff their size 18s into Cinderella’s crystal clodhoppers, let’s just say the obvious: There has never been a better wrap-up to the greatest tournament in sports.

It needs just one thing to be perfect — UCLA and UNC in the championship game on April 7. If we’re going to have the top four in the Final Four, we may as well go all the way and have a dream match in the title game.

Great teams generate great interest and great ratings. As much as we marvel when an upstart school cracks the Final Four, the ratings show that such teams don’t resonate with the audience the way a clash of titans does.

That’s why the best possible final is UCLA-UNC. It’s the Southeast against the West, one end of the country against the other. That’s not putting down Kansas and Memphis, which didn’t get where they are by defying the odds. But UCLA-UNC is like Frazier-Ali — there’s nothing better.

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I know I’ll get a lot of argument on this from people who are going to say that the tournament is about upsets and surprise. But we’re really on the same side in this one, because nothing is more surprising than the rankings and the polls holding serve from the first day of the season to the last.

So if you wanted an utterly unpredictable outcome, you’ve got it. Anyone who’s been filling out brackets for even a few years knows that the first rule is to never advance all four top seeds into the finals. If you do, you expose yourself as a rank amateur who knows nothing about the game.

That’s because the seedings are based on perceived strength; they represent opinions, no matter how educated those opinions are. And this is a one-and-done tournament, not the best-of-seven or even the best-of-three. Even great teams have off days and underdogs have their days.

Add to that the fact that college basketball has more depth than it ever has. These aren’t the 60s and 70s when UCLA had a corner on the talent and the tournament. The field is up to 65 teams and even the guardians of the game are talking about adding even more teams, not to make anyone happy, but because the depth of the game warrants it.

It’s been 32 years since a team went undefeated through the regular season and the tournament — that was Indiana. Back then, players stayed in school for four years; today, the best ones play a year and check out of college and into the pros. Assembling super teams has never been easy, but it’s harder now than it ever was.

So for the top four teams in the preseason to find their way to the Final Four is almost beyond comprehension today. Yet, that’s what we have — for the first time ever.

Go ahead and mourn the absence of a Cinderella if you must. But don’t say this Final Four is too predictable. It’s the biggest surprise we’ve ever had, which makes it the best, too.

Just give us UNC-UCLA and Tyler Hansbrough and Kevin Love in the final, and it will be perfect.

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