Illini, Tar Heels Restore Sanity to March Madness

After three weeks of upsets and busted brackets . . . after Vermont over Syracuse and Bucknell over Kansas and West Virginia over Wake Forest . . . after Patrick Sparks toeing the line and three regional finals going overtime, it turns out the final matchup of the 2005 NCAA men’s basketball tournament could have been e-mailed in months ago.

Monday night in St. Louis, with the national championship at stake, it will be No. 1-seeded Illinois against No. 2-seeded North Carolina, the endgame everyone expected all along, the first No. 1 versus No. 2 showdown in the final since UCLA-Kentucky in 1975.

Thanks for stopping by, Villanova and Wisconsin and Wisconsin Milwaukee.

Louisville and Michigan State, here, take these handsome Final Four rings as your parting gifts.

Illinois and North Carolina have marched methodically into the final, a pairing that could have been churned out by doing nothing more than punching some numbers into a computer.

That’s the kind of run we have had in college sports so far in 2004-05.

We have had a football season that needed a playoff and a basketball season that needed the BCS.

Saturday in the national semifinals, there were no surprises, except perhaps the lopsided final scores.

In the first game, Illinois, 37-1 and seeded first overall, blew out Louisville in the second half on the way to a 72-57 victory.

In the second game, North Carolina, 32-4 and seeded second overall, blew out Michigan State in the second half on the way to an 87-71 victory.

Finally, it was time to scrap the hunch bets, to ignore momentum, to forget the previous turns on the road to St. Louis.

Hadn’t Louisville proved its mettle by taking out Georgia Tech, the 2004 NCAA runner-up, and Washington, the Albuquerque Regional’s top-seeded team, in the second and third rounds before roaring past West Virginia down the stretch in the regional final?

Didn’t Michigan State end the season for the top two teams in the Austin Regional, first Duke, then Kentucky, over the course of three days last weekend?

Meanwhile, didn’t Illinois owe its place in the Final Four to Lute Olson checking out of the Chicago Regional final with his Arizona team still on the floor with nine minutes still to play?

Shouldn’t Illini alums have sent Olson at least a fruit basket as a sign of their sincere appreciation?

And what about North Carolina? Through four rounds, we watched the Tar Heels and their much-hyped talent, and kept waiting for them to play their first impressive game. They squeaked by Villanova in the third round on a dubious officiating call. In the Syracuse Regional final, they barely held off Wisconsin, the third-best team in the Big Ten Conference, before sweating out a six-point triumph.

But during the second half of both semifinals Saturday, the tumblers finally fell into place for Illinois and North Carolina. Leading Louisville by only 50-49 with 9 minutes 36 seconds left, the Illini reeled off an 11-0 run in less than four minutes to pull away. Trailing Michigan State by 38-33 at intermission, the Tar Heels outscored the Spartans by 21 points during the last 20 minutes.

As a result, two storied championship droughts will go head to head in Monday’s final, meaning something, one way or the other, is going to have to give.

Illinois has played men’s basketball for 100 years and has yet to win an NCAA title in the sport. Monday will mark the Illini’s first appearance in an NCAA basketball final.

North Carolina Coach Roy Williams, 0 for 4 in previous Final Fours, finds himself 40 minutes away from his breakthrough victory. Of course, he has been this far before -- most recently in 2003, when his championship drought collided with Jim Boeheim’s championship drought and Williams’ Kansas Jayhawks lost to Boeheim’s Syracuse Orangemen.

Ominous sign for Williams on Monday: Illinois also wears orange.

Williams can only hope heritage and geography offset uniform hues. Compare the states, North Carolina and Illinois, and when it comes to championship banners, it is no contest.

Schools from the state of North Carolina -- Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State -- have combined to win eight NCAA titles, the Tar Heels most recently in 1993.

Only one school from Illinois has won an NCAA basketball championship: Loyola of Chicago, in 1963.

North Carolina has also been cleaning up the Big Ten of late. Took care of Wisconsin in the quarterfinals. Knocked out Michigan State in the semifinals. A victory over Illinois in the final will make it a three-game Big Ten sweep.

Illinois will counter with its outstanding guard play and scoring balance and the defensive expertise of Deron Williams, who took on Arizona’s Salim Stoudamire and Louisville’s Francisco Garcia in back-to-back games and held them a combined four for 23 from the field.

The teams the belong in the final have reached the final. March Madness was fun while it lasted, but once the tournament hit April, there was no more fooling around.