SAN ANTONIO — This one's personal. Saturday night, as everyone knows, Kansas plays North Carolina in the Final Four, and there's so much history between the two schools, a little bad blood, some brotherly love, a few memorable games, fascinating connections, a longstanding Roy Williams wrestling match and so on.

Here's the thing: These are also the two programs that have had the biggest impact on my feelings about college basketball. I grew up in North Carolina. And I've been writing about Kansas basketball for a dozen years. The Tar Heels changed my life when I was young and still trying figuring out what I wanted to become. And as a writer, I have watched the Jayhawks get close again and again and then fall just short.

I can remember my shock in North Carolina when they let us out of school early so we could watch the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament. I can remember the tears of Wilt Chamberlain when he returned to Allen Fieldhouse, and everyone stood for him, and he choked out a "Rock Chalk Jayhawk." I can remember little kids on playgrounds wearing full Tar Heels uniforms, down to their Carolina Blue shoes, and shouting "Michael Jordan shoots!" just as they let go their own jump shots. And I get e-mails from soldiers in Iraq whose one connection to home and the Midwest is Kansas basketball.

"People in Kansas don't really have any idea what we have here," North Carolina coach Roy Williams said this week. "And the people here have no idea what they have in Kansas. Everybody is in their own world, which is OK."

I'm lucky. I've lived in both worlds. Like I say, this one's personal.

I didn't fall in love with college basketball until high school. Up to then, I had lived in Cleveland, and that's a professional sports town. Browns. Indians. Cavaliers. Nobody I knew in Cleveland cared about college anything except maybe for Ohio State football, which was like a separate category.

I fell in love with college basketball my sophomore year in high school, a few months after my father got a job in Charlotte, N.C. That October, a guy in my psychology class asked: "What's your team?" He meant ACC basketball team — I knew nothing about it. He tried to sell me on North Carolina State, which had a brash young coach named Jim Valvano. He told me only Yankees rooted for Duke, and I didn't want to be known as a Yankee. He said only rural kids chose Wake Forest.

"What about North Carolina?" I asked.

He grimaced and said, "Sure, if you want to be like everyone else."

Well, I did. I was a new kid at a new high school, and all I wanted was to be like everyone else. I decided to root for North Carolina. It was the first sports decision of my life — all of my Cleveland teams had been bequeathed to me, like ugly furniture that you have to keep because they are supposedly family heirlooms.

I chose North Carolina. And, by pure coincidence, that year the Tar Heels had James Worthy, Sam Perkins and a freshman guard named Michael Jordan. They were virtually unbeatable. And that guy in psychology was right; I was like everyone else, wearing Carolina blue shirts, talking basketball in school every day, bragging to each other about how the Heels would beat Clemson by 30 or whatever. I remember this clearly: North Carolina fans like to talk. I fit right in.

In the national championship game, Jordan made the final jump shot, Georgetown's Sleepy Floyd unwittingly threw the last pass to Worthy, and North Carolina won the national title. I jumped up and down over and over again while car horns outside our apartment blared in celebration.

Fifteen years later, I walked into Allen Fieldhouse for the first time. I had, only a few weeks earlier, taken this job at The Kansas City Star . I had gone into the library and for days I read everything I could about Kansas and Missouri sports.

That did not prepare me. I was pretty sure I knew college basketball. I had grown up with North Carolina, of course, and I had written often about Kentucky and Indiana, and I had been yelled at by Bob Huggins, and I had been to Cameron Indoor Stadium and Freedom Hall and The Pit. I felt like I had seen pretty much everything.

Then I went to Allen Fieldhouse and it was ... different. It was a Saturday afternoon; sunlight poured in through the windows over the retired jerseys — I've always loved afternoon games at Allen Fieldhouse best. The place smelled like buttered popcorn, at least to me, even though I'm not entirely certain they sell popcorn at Allen Fieldhouse.

It was loud that day; it's hard to judge these things, but I don't think it gets as loud at Cameron or Rupp Arena or Pauley Pavilion as it can get in the big moments of, say, a close Kansas-Missouri game. I'd heard the Rock Chalk Chant before, at an NCAA Tournament game, but it's different when 16,000 are doing it at once, it's kind of strange, a little bit haunted, unlike any other cheer.

Roy is right about one thing. People in North Carolina have no idea. Because of ESPN, everybody knows all about North Carolina. But Midwestern basketball is still a secret; they don't know in North Carolina what an incredible place Gallagher-Iba is or what a terrific basketball tradition Kansas State has or how passionate fans are at Iowa State or what a unique and towering presence Norm Stewart was at Missouri for all those years.

They don't know. They don't realize that more Final Fours have been played at Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City than any other arena in the country.

After that first game at Allen Fieldhouse, I met Roy Williams for the first time. I told him I was from North Carolina. He semismiled and said: "Well, we play some pretty good basketball here, too."

OK, so let's see if we can get all the connections straight. James Naismith invented basketball. We know that. He went to Kansas, where he coached Phog Allen, perhaps the most influential coach in college basketball history. OK.

Phog Allen coached Dean Smith at Kansas. Then Dean Smith won all those games and two national titles at North Carolina. Dean Smith coached Larry Brown at North Carolina. Then Larry Brown guided a team with Danny Manning and his backup singers to a national title for Kansas. Still with us?

Wilt Chamberlain played at Kansas, of course, and his most painful loss was in the 1957 championship game. To North Carolina. Dean Smith was ejected from one tournament game in his long career. That was against Kansas.

Bob Dole played at Kansas, and then he became a Kansas senator, and then he married Elizabeth Dole, and then she became a North Carolina senator .

And, of course, there's the whole Roy Williams conundrum. Roy Williams was an assistant coach for Dean Smith at North Carolina, and then he went to replace Larry Brown at Kansas and then he reached four Final Fours, and then he went back to North Carolina (to replace his old Kansas assistant Matt Doherty) and then Williams won a national title, and now he's coaching North Carolina (with his assistants, who all played at Kansas) against Kansas in the Final Four.

And so on. These programs are like twin brothers separated at birth.

They are different too, of course. Well, the South and the Midwest are different. The barbecue is different. The tea is different. The words sound different. The weather is different. There's a reserve in the Midwest. There's a sense of formality in the South.

Macaroni and cheese is listed as a vegetable in good North Carolina restaurants. You can choose between the short end and the long end in good Heartland restaurants. In the South, y'all can be singular and people are always fixin' to do stuff. In the Midwest, you will get asked if it is actually hot enough for you, and a joke can be so dry that you won't pick up on it for three days.

In the South, fast-food restaurants, technically speaking, do not exist. A drive-thru line at McDonald's moves slower than traffic in Times Square.

In the Midwest, many people will stand up and start leaving a movie the very instant the credits begin to roll. It doesn't matter if there's still action happening, once they see words on the screen, they're out of there. It makes you wonder whether Midwestern people leave at the beginning of foreign movies with subtitles.

But, generally speaking, there's a lot in common between the South and the Heartland, lots of good-hearted people, lots of folks who would stop if your car got stuck on the side of the highway or hold the door open for you at the mall or bring over a meal if someone got sick and all that.

Basketball is a big thing in both places. There's so much Kansas basketball influence at North Carolina and North Carolina influence at Kansas that it's sometimes hard to tell the games apart. Saturday's game could be one for the ages.

And as far as the programs go: Well, they'll tell you in North Carolina that basketball is a bigger deal there; maybe it is. They'll tell you at Kansas that the basketball tradition is stronger here; and maybe it is. They're both pretty great.

There is one more difference. I was talking to a friend in North Carolina on Thursday, and he was saying "You know the Tar Heels are going to win Saturday." I told him that, in the end, that's the difference between a Jayhawks fan and Tar Heels fan. I said, "See, a Kansas fan would never say that."

He said: "Why not? Are North Carolina fans more confident?" I said: "Not exactly. North Carolina fans just like talking more."