NEW ORLEANS - As a basketball game, it could be a classic. As melodrama, it already is.

What's your favorite storyline for tonight's championship game - Dueling bridesmaid coaches? Senior experience against youthful looseness? "Old School" Kirk Hinrich? Or nouveau (soon-to-be) rich Carmelo Anthony?

Bop-till-you-drop offense? Or a 2-3 zone played by guys with arms on loan from the Octopus Collection? What's Kueth Duany's sleeve length? Forty-eight Incredibly Long?

College basketball is a great game. It has to be, to overcome all the slime that follows it around. (And, as we saw last month, occasionally tracks it down.) Tonight, Syracuse and Kansas will show us why.

Tonight, Jim Boeheim will win a national title after 27 years at Syracuse. Or he will add to his case for the Phil Mickelson Lifetime Achievement Award. Roy Williams, 15 years at Kansas, will win it all in his fourth trip to the Final Four. Or he will cry. Actually, Williams will cry either way.

"The people that have criticized me have not criticized me to my face," Williams said Sunday, in response to a question about his weeping after games. "I'm emotional, and I will be tomorrow night."

Thank you, coach. Now stop that crying.

Neither Williams nor Boeheim is the sentimental pick. They're both acquired tastes. Boeheim offers a world-weary condescension that's a product of his 27 years at Syracuse, being almost the best. "This is the last time we have to do this, thank god," Boeheim announced upon arriving at his Sunday press session. Boeheim is funny and smart, but still comes with cloud attached. Which is what you might expect from a guy who has lived his whole life in Syracuse, N.Y.

Williams is as slick as January in Fairbanks. Beneath the drawling folksiness and multiple uses of the word "dang," Williams is preachy and defensive. On Sunday, he made many references to media "criticism," though it's hard to remember much press negativity ever emanating from Lawrence, Kan.

Final Four head coaches Jim Boeheim of Syracuse and Roy Williams of Kansas smile as they prepare for an interview Sunday. (AP photo) | ZOOM |

"The true dream for me would be to stand on the side and watch these kids celebrate," Williams said. He has a point there. On the KU sideline are Hinrich and Nick Collison, two Seniors Who Stayed, which, in these soldier-of-fortune times in college basketball, qualifies them for sainthood. Or something even less common in college basketball, a bachelor of arts degree.

Kansas decided the pair were "Old School" and marketed them as such. Nobody seems to know what Old School is, least of all Hinrich and Collison. Most likely, it's a stereotype placed on white guys from Iowa whose fathers are coaches and who don't dribble much between their legs.

If Hinrich is Old School, Eminem is the fifth Beatle.

And then there's the freshman Anthony, maybe the most fun player in college basketball. Anthony spent half of Saturday's game jabbering with Texas coach Rick Barnes - "I asked him, did he pay the referees," Anthony explained - and the other half grinning like he'd just met Halle Berry.

In between, he had 33 points, 14 rebounds, brought the ball up against pressure and played with the sort of confident abandon you don't often see in players a decade older than Anthony's 18 years. "It's almost like they're too naÔve to be nervous," was how Syracuse assistant Mike Hopkins put it. He was describing all of the Orangemen's young players, but especially Anthony, who plays the game in an aura of pure joy.

Someone asked Anthony, "Do you feel like you can score on Keith Langford?" Kansas' 6-4 guard. The 6-8 Anthony offered an are-you-nuts laugh. "Yeah," he said. "I can score on anybody."

Will that be enough? Can Syracuse's 2-3 zone slow the Jayhawks' break? "You can't prepare for somebody this different in a one-day period," said Williams, and that might be Syracuse's singular advantage.

Or will KU's quick-strike offense deliver psychological debilitation to the Orange, the way it did to Marquette? "That can self-destruct a team," Syracuse freshman point guard Gerry McNamara said.

Regardless, will a victory validate the life's work of one of the two coaches Boeheim sarcastically called "these long-suffering guys under this tremendous burden"? Or will it be just another game?

"People don't believe me, but if we don't win it, godamighty I'm going to consider myself an awfully lucky person," Williams said.

And he won't have enough Kleenex, win or lose.

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E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com

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Syracuse vs. Kansas

Tipoff: 9:22 p.m. today

Where: Superdome, New Orleans

TV: Chs. 12,7

Radio: WLW-AM (700) and WCKY-AM (1360)

Syracuse's road to the final: Beat Manhattan, Oklahoma St., Auburn, Oklahoma and Texas

Kansas' road to the final: Beat Utah St., Arizona St., Duke, Arizona and Marquette.