Ken Davis

SAN ANTONIO - Kansas coach Bill Self called it the best 15 minutes one of his teams had ever played. It would be absolutely insulting to argue the point.

You could be the most confident coach in the history of college basketball and still you would never imagine looking up at the scoreboard, during a Final Four game, to see your team leading 40-12 with five minutes remaining in the first half.

Those things simply do not happen — at least not until Saturday night.  And to think earlier in the week, Self was asked if he felt like a rookie heading into the first Final Four of his career.

“It was the best 15 I’ve ever had anybody play because you’re playing against the No. 1 seed in the tournament, on the biggest stage,” Self said after his Jayhawks roughed up North Carolina 84-66 in a national semifinal game at the Alamodome. “I thought to start the game, instead of having 10 hands out there, it felt like we had 14 or 16. I mean, our guys were all after every ball.”

All week long this was billed as the greatest Final Four ever. Memphis vs. UCLA. Kansas vs. North Carolina. The hype was built around four No. 1 seeds coming together for the first time. But instead of two classic semifinals, the crowd of 43,718 witnessed a laugher and a wild ride.

Memphis defeated UCLA 78-63 in the laugher. Kansas let that 28-point lead slip to four points midway through the second half and then finished off the Tar Heels with another authoritative stroke in the final five minutes.

“I guess it’s a little like that story about the little engine that spent so much trying to get up the hill, it didn’t have anything left when it got to the top,” North Carolina coach Roy Williams said. “We sort of came out a little more casual than we’d like to. They hit us right between the eyes. We probably rushed things a little bit. And they just kept hammering.”

It had to be strange for Williams, hearing that Rock Chalk Jayhawk chant that was so comforting to him for 15 years when he was the coach at Kansas. This time it started with 1:36 to play and signaled the end of North Carolina’s season.

“The first word that I think of is frustrating,” said Tyler Hansbrough, the national player of the year who finished with a rather ordinary line of 17 points and nine rebounds. “You get here to the Final Four, you feel like you’ve been playing good, and then we just didn’t come out with the energy we needed tonight.”

In their regional final victory over Davidson, the Jayhawks played like they had the weight of 20 years of Kansas misfortune on their shoulders. Before every pass and before every jump shot, the Jayhawks seemed to be reflecting on the program’s many missed opportunities under Williams and Self. Kansas won its last national championship in 1988 when Larry Brown was coaching and Danny Manning was playing. Under Williams, the Jayhawks were talented enough to win it all in 1997, 2002 and 2003 but came up short each time.

Last week, the pressure to get Self over his personal Elite Eight hurdle seemed to dominate the news in Detroit. So did the heat that came when Kansas had to win to complete the first picture-perfect Final Four, with all four No. 1 seeds advancing to San Antonio.

By the time Kansas took the floor in the Alamodome, it all seemed to be a distant memory. The Jayhawks clearly had a new attitude.

Special feature Memphis vs. Kansas: Who has the edge? NBCSports.com breaks down the players, coaches and more in the NCAA title game. You decide who wins. NBCSports.com

“Yeah, I think the pressure was off of us big-time,” said Brandon Rush, who led all scorers with 25 points on 11-of-17 shooting. “Against Davidson, we were uptight a little bit. We just didn’t play our type of game. But tonight we came out, we ran up and down the floor with North Carolina. We just played our type of game.”

In the locker room before Saturday night’s game, Self may have given the pep talk of his career.

“This is why you came to Kansas,” Self said.

He talked about all that pressure faced a week ago and told them it was gone. He urged them to have as much fun playing as he was having coaching them. He told them they were playing a very good team, and then he told them they were pretty good too.

If there was any leftover tension, Self’s words seemed to melt that all away. The Jayhawks opened the game doing everything they needed to do to beat a North Carolina team that had been awarded the No. 1 seed overall by the NCAA men’s basketball committee.

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