Tar Heels win dirty en route to Final Four

It’s not that I’m giddy just because my roommate now owes me a whole sandwich from Hoagie Haven (we bet half a hoagie on whether the Heels would make the Final Four, plus the half he already owes me after I picked Tailor Made to win “I Love New York” season two).

But when you grow up in North Carolina, you learn to pick a shade of blue (or red if you’re a loser and like NC State) — and bleed that color for life. Being the son of two 1973 UNC graduates, I chose the lighter — and more godly — shade of blue.

Any Carolina game can make me either the happiest person you know or the most unpleasant, but I get especially tense for these tournament games and our (yes, I still say “our”) two games against Duke — who, just in case my professor, Peter Applebome, is reading, I’d like to point out lost in the second round to West Virginia.

Meanwhile, UNC — led by the presumptive Player of the Year Tyler Hansbrough — bulldozed its way through the East Regional, running riot over Mount St. Mary’s, Arkansas and Washington State before pulling away late over a good team in Louisville (I made sure every bottle of bourbon had been removed from my room before I watched that one).

The boys in blue will now meet coach Roy Williams’ former team, the Kansas Jayhawks. I’m sure the talking idiots on TV are salivating at the chance to hype up the potential drama, how ol’ Roy agonized so much about leaving Kansas for Carolina and how he now has to face the team he took to four Final Four and two championship games (though he didn’t get the ring until he returned to Chapel Hill).

“I don’t think my team can get distracted from it, and I’m getting very close to putting an end to it right now, because it’s not the story,” Williams told reporters Tuesday. “The story is Kansas and their great program and their great team in 2008, and North Carolina and their great program and team of 2008.”

To be fair, the Kansas game worries me more than any so far in this tournament. With all four No. 1 seeds in San Antonio, the title seems more up for grabs than in the last two years, when Florida was the de facto favorite. Of the three remaining teams, the Jayhawks scare me the most because they balance offense and defense well, they are athletic, and they can run up and down the floor — much like UNC.

The other two don’t bother me quite as much. Memphis is freakishly athletic and has improved its notoriously bad free-throw shooting, but I don’t think its weak Conference-USA schedule has made the team tough enough for the Final Four. UCLA — led by Kevin Love, a shoo-in to win “World’s Ugliest Chin-Strap Beard” award — impresses me even less than Memphis, with its string of near losses to teams that just aren’t that good. Until the Bruins’ blowout win over Xavier, I barely thought of them as a contender.

But, like every other know-it-all who has written or said something about this weekend’s games, my opinion means jack compared to what Hansbourgh, Love, Sherron Collins or Derrick Rose will do on Saturday and Monday. Nonetheless, anyone who loves basketball as much as I do can’t wait for Saturday, Monday and finally Tuesday, when I wake up knowing that my Tar Heels are national champions.