Kansas rocks the Tar Heels

SAN ANTONIO -- Kansas couldn’t win a national championship with Roy Williams as coach, but the Jayhawks are one game from winning one without him.

The road to this year’s title went through Williams.

Kansas defeated North Carolina, 84-66, in the Alamodome on Saturday to earn the right to face Memphis on Monday for the NCAA championship.

Williams coached Kansas for 15 years before leaving in 2003 to coach at his alma mater.

Many in Kansas saw it as an act of betrayal and let Williams hear it with boos in the first meeting of the schools since Williams changed basketball addresses.

“I hope it goes away forever,” he said afterward of the emotional strain his departure caused.

It looked like Kansas was going to win ridiculously easy when it rushed to a 40-12 lead. The Jayhawks went on a 25-2 run in one stretch after leading 15-10 and thought they had knocked the tar out the Tar Heels.

Kansas played so hard, with substitutes running in and out of the game, forward Darnell Jackson said, that “everyone was gasping for air.”

North Carolina players watched with jaws agape.

“It was like, that wasn’t North Carolina out there,” senior guard Quentin Thomas observed.

“I told someone it looked like we have never played basketball before.”

Then it looked like the game was going to be hard, with North Carolina fighting back to cut the lead to 17 at the half and to four, 54-50, with 11:14 left.

“We went brain dead for a little bit,” Jackson said.

And then Kansas made one last frenzied closing statement.

“It was three different games,” Kansas Coach Bill Self said.

And now Kansas gets to play in the big one, with the Jayhawks trying to win their first national championship since 1988.

North Carolina (36-2) was the top-seeded team in this year’s NCAA field and had won its previous four tournament games by 10 points or more.

Kansas (36-3) was the lowest of the four top-seeded schools, last seen in the Midwest Regional finals praying a Davidson three-point shot in the finals seconds would not fall.

It didn’t, and Kansas escaped with a two-point win.

After that, how tough could North Carolina be?

“I think the pressure was off us big time,” said Kansas guard Brandon Rush, who finished with a game-high 25 points. “Against Davidson, we were a little uptight. We just didn’t play our type of game. But tonight we came out, we ran up and down the floor with North Carolina.”

North Carolina was considered an almost unstoppable offensive machine, yet Kansas held the Tar Heels to nearly 24 points less than their scoring average of 89.5 points.

The first half of the first half was a basketball dissection.

“This is the first time this North Carolina team panicked,” Tar Heels guard Marcus Ginyard would later say. “It got to the point where they were just up big.”

Rush’s long three-pointer with 6:48 left in the first half put Kansas up by 28.

What a rush.

Dunks, steals, put-backs, three-pointers?

Kansas did it all.

Cole Aldrich, a 6-11 freshman center, played toe-to-toe with North Carolina’s Tyler Hansbrough, the national player of the year.

Hansbrough would get his 19 points and nine rebounds, but everything early was hard labor. Kansas clogged the lanes and fouled up traffic.

“We made them earn their points,” Rush said.

Great defense?

“It wasn’t just mine,” Aldrich said of his harassment of Hansbrough.

Aldrich contributed eight points and seven rebounds in 17 effective minutes.

Midway through this mauling, a perplexed Williams was shown on the video scoreboard screen taking off his glasses.

Jayhawks fans stood and jeered the shaken image.

But Kansas almost started the celebration too early and, before you knew, a 28-point lead was down to four.

Then, with Kansas leading, 58-53, Danny Green’s three-point attempt to cut the lead to two circled the rim and fell out.

“Things started going downhill from there,” Ginyard said.

Williams took defeat graciously, shaking hands with every Jayhawks player. He hugged most and whispered encouraging words to some.

“I hope it has been set aside,” Williams said of the rancor. “I’m too thin-skinned probably. Those things have hurt.”

What hurt Saturday was Kansas shooting 53% and North Carolina making only 24 of 67 attempts (35.8%).

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chris.dufresne@latimes.com