Tar Heels up against state of Michigan

What a shock: The school everyone said was No. 1 at the beginning of the season has earned the chance to prove that it’s No. 1 at the end.

Getting from November to now wasn’t as easy as it sounds, but North Carolina Coach Roy Williams’ team is one game from almost living up to its incredible hype.

North Carolina used its considerable height, power and point guard Ty Lawson advantage to defeat Villanova on Saturday, 83-69, to advance to Monday night’s national title game against Michigan State.

With four losses, North Carolina can’t finish with a perfect season, as some had predicted. But 34-4 won’t look bad on a trophy, either, even if Saturday’s game was anything but a classic.

One team, in fact, made only nine of 29 shots in the second half -- and that team won.

“Nobody could make a shot,” Williams said, also speaking on behalf of a Villanova team that shot 10 for 38 in the second half after making only 16 of 41 before intermission. “But we made plays. We’re still playing. That’s what we wanted to do. Jimmy Valvano’s line about survive and advance is what we wanted to do.”

It looked like “game-over” when North Carolina jumped to a 17-point first-half lead. But pesky Villanova, with no starter taller than 6 feet 8, was hard to shake loose.

The Wildcats cut the lead to nine at the half and then quickly closed the gap to five, at 50-45, on Shane Clark’s three-pointer only two minutes into the second half.

North Carolina eventually, though, pushed the lead back to 18 on Wayne Ellington’s baseline three-pointer with 4:45 left. Villanova desperately tried to stay in contact, but then the clock ran out.

North Carolina players, though they made only 40.3% of their field-goal attempts, looked like sharpshooters compared to their opponents.

Villanova (30-8) finished at 32.9% for the game, making 26 of 79 shots, and had trouble dealing with North Carolina’s size. The Tar Heels brought 7-footer Tyler Zeller and the 6-10 Ed Davis -- off the bench.

Villanova also couldn’t handle Carolina’s short guy, either, the 5-11 Lawson, who led all scorers with 22 points.

Lawson also had seven rebounds and eight assists. Wayne Ellington had 20 points and Tyler Hansbrough had 18 points and 11 rebounds.

Scottie Reynolds led Villanova with 17 points.

“There’s nothing wrong with failing,” Villanova Coach Jay Wright said afterward. “You can’t fear failure. And when it happens, you’ve got to learn from it. So I really want us to learn from this tonight.”

Monday’s North Carolina-Michigan State title game will be a rematch of a Dec. 3 game played at Ford Field that the Spartans have been waiting months to avenge.

North Carolina won by 35 points, 98-63, in front of a crowd of “only” 25,267, almost an empty house compared with the 72,456 who filled Ford Field on Saturday.

North Carolina’s Hansbrough had his way that day, with 25 points and 11 rebounds in 27 minutes, while Michigan State shot a woeful 34.8%, making only 23 of 66 shots.

Williams says he greatly admires what Michigan State has done since that loss and understands what the Spartans mean to a state suffering from economic decline.

“I’m happy for them,” Williams said. “I will not be as happy on Monday night, OK? Let’s understand that.”

Michigan State made it to the last game with an 82-73 victory over Connecticut in the first national semifinal game.

This is North Carolina’s record 18th Final Four appearance and the Tar Heels are now one game from winning their fifth national title overall and second under Williams.

This was a far better Tar Heels effort than last year’s national semifinals in San Antonio, when Williams’ former team, Kansas, raced to a 40-12 lead over North Carolina in the first half. The Tar Heels rallied to cut the lead to five in the second half before losing by 18.

In its five-game run to the title game, North Carolina has defeated every opponent by 12 points or more, starting with a 43-point opening win against Radford.

Villanova has always been the little program that could. The Wildcats entered the game with 15 victories as the lower-seeded team in the NCAA tournament, the most since seeding began in 1979.

Five of those wins came in eighth-seeded Villanova’s improbable 1985 run to the national title.

This was Villanova’s fourth Final Four and the first since 1985, the year the Wildcats won the national title.

“We had a good season,” sophomore guard Corey Fisher said. “We stuck together. We played hard tonight but came up short.”

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chris.dufresne@latimes.com