Tap-dancing trees, elephants behind the wheel and the NCAA final

NEW ORLEANS — Kansas hadn’t even left the Superdome floor Saturday night after coming from behind to stun Ohio State and reach Monday’s NCAA tournament final when the talk began.

No chance. No way. No how.

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That is the prognosis for the Jayhawks when they face Kentucky in college basketball’s national championship game. The question wasn’t whether Kentucky would win, but by how much.

“We get to play the best team in the country hands down from day one until now,” Kansas Coach Bill Self said after his team had pulled yet another escape act to beat the Buckeyes, 64-62. “We could play as well as we played in the second half tonight for two halves Monday night and it might not be good enough.”

That’s the general consensus. The only real surprise of semifinal Saturday was that Louisville was able to forge a 49-49 tie with Kentucky almost 31 minutes into the game. The Wildcats quickly erased any thoughts of a monumental upset with an 11-2 run.

Kansas is a team that began the season with relatively low prospects — for Kansas. The Jayhawks were not a preseason top-10 team and weren’t picked to win The Big Twelve. Kentucky began the season ranked No. 2 — behind North Carolina — quickly ascended to No. 1 and hasn’t budged since. The Wildcats will go into the title game with a record of 37-2 (Kansas is 32-6) and a chance to tie Memphis’s record of 38 wins in a season, set four years ago when Kentucky Coach John Calipari was the Tigers’ coach.

Which is where the story line begins to become more intriguing than it may appear.

That Memphis team lost the national championship game — to Kansas. That Memphis team had the same Achilles’ heel this Kentucky team has had at times — free throw shooting. It was poor free throw shooting down the stretch that allowed Mario Chalmers to hit the three-pointer just before the buzzer that sent the game into overtime.

While Calipari vs. Rick Pitino was the sexy coaching matchup of this weekend because of the antipathy between them, Calipari vs. Self has more history, if only because the two met in one of the best championship games in recent memory just four years ago, with Calipari’s team the favorite. None of the players that night will be on the court Monday, but the two coaches playing hoops chess with one another will be the same.

The atmosphere that surrounds this game will be very different than Louisville-Kentucky, which began with neither coach looking the other in the eye during the NCAA-mandated pre-game handshake.

Even after Kentucky’s hard-fought 69-61 victory, Pitino was still lobbing not-so-subtle grenades in Calipari’s direction as he headed for the door. Asked a question about whether his team’s run to The Final Four had reinvigorated him, Pitino said this: “I think so. I marvel at what John does. I couldn’t do it. I can’t say hello and goodbye in seven months. It’s just not me. I love getting to know [senior] Kyle Kuric and [senior] Chris Smith. I feel like they’re my children, I’m part of their life.” Pause. “Not that he doesn’t feel that way about his kids.”