Phil Sheridan | History, old and new

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. - Every generation wants to make its mark, create its own history. It's just that it's tough to do when the past won't go away.

The young athletes who will compete for a berth in the Final Four here tonight have all seen North Carolina's Michael Jordan sink the jump shot that beat Georgetown for the national championship.

"I've watched that game lots of times," said Georgetown center Roy Hibbert, a student of his sport's past.

"I've probably seen the clip of Michael Jordan hitting that shot over 100 times," Carolina point guard Ty Lawson said. "I see it before every game at the Dean Dome and on ESPN Classic."

Get ready to feel ancient. Jordan, then a freshman playing for Dean Smith, hit that shot a quarter of a century ago in the Louisiana Superdome. It was 1982.

"None of my [players] were even born," said Roy Williams, then Smith's assistant and now head coach of the Tar Heels. "To historians or old guys like us, the matchup might mean a little more, I guess."

Tonight's East regional final - No. 1 seed North Carolina against No. 2 Georgetown - isn't intriguing merely because of what happened in 1982. These are two very good and very different teams. But there's no ignoring the echoes of the past, and what they say about the way college basketball has changed.

"These programs are like cousins," said John Thompson III, the Georgetown coach who sat facing the Hoyas' bench (and his father) at the Superdome in 1982. "And it's not just because of Pops' relationship with Coach Smith. I went to two basketball camps every summer when I was growing up: Georgetown's and North Carolina's. I made two official visits to colleges: North Carolina and Princeton."

It was considered something of a novelty that Jordan, just 19 years old, took such a big-time shot for a team that included James Worthy and Sam Perkins. Now? All five of Williams' starters tonight are freshmen and sophomores.

"They think Michael Jordan invented the game," Williams said of his "wacky" bunch of youngsters. "They think [James] Naismith must be related to Dean Smith."

This is college basketball circa now, when you get top players for a year, maybe two. There are only three players on Williams' roster from his 2005 national champions, a team that included Sean May, Raymond Felton and Rashad McCants.

A two-year turnaround and Williams' team is playing for a return to the Final Four. This miracle was accomplished because Williams is a good coach and because half the great high school basketball players in the country want to wear Carolina blue. Williams said the biggest issue facing his team all season was whether he could find playing time for so many blue-chip players.

While Carolina has managed the feat of remaining at or near the top of college basketball for going on forever, Georgetown slipped a bit since John Thompson Jr.'s heyday. His son, who played for Pete Carril at Princeton, has Georgetown back on the brink of greatness.

"It's really hard to get to this level," Williams said. "It's even harder to stay here. People kind of take it for granted with North Carolina. I try never to take it for granted."

Williams calls the Thompsons "Big John" and "Young John" and professes admiration for both. What's kind of fun about the current Hoyas is the way they look like the cast of a Hollywood movie about the teams of the mid-1980s.

Thompson looks enough like his father to play the role. Patrick Ewing Jr. would play his own father. Roy Hibbert could be Alonzo Mourning. The fathers and sons certainly add a little sparkle to that 25th anniversary angle.

If Williams has remarkably clear recollections of everything Dean Smith said in the final huddle before Jordan's shot, Young John has a visceral memory of watching his father's team come so close.

"That's difficult to handle," Thompson said. "It's the national championship game. All the blood, sweat and tears, the luck, the work that goes into getting to that point - a lot goes into getting to that point. You don't know if the opportunity is ever going to come along again."

It did for his father, who won the national title in 1984. It took Williams until 2005 to get his championship. He'd like nothing better than to get back but will have to beat a well-coached, physical and smart Georgetown team to advance.

For the fans, for the coaches, it will be a game informed by a lot of history. For the players, though, it will be a chance to make a little history of their own.

"We just want to go to the Final Four," Carolina's Tyler Hansbrough said. "These are two hyped-up programs, but really, we don't care who we play. We want to win."