Thousands of fans were descending on North Carolina's campus and the surrounding bars Monday night to cheer on the favored Tar Heels against Michigan State in the national title game in Detroit.
The Heels' on-campus arena, the Smith Center, was broadcasting Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson and the rest of coach Roy Williams' squad on a 16-foot-by-20-foot screen and four video scoreboards. Nearby, the main downtown drag of restaurants, shops and bars was also gearing up to watch the school try for the its fifth national title.
Guy Murphy, the general manager at Top of the Hill restaurant on Franklin Street, said "a couple of hundred"
people lined up around the block -- some camping in tents as early as 2 a.m. Monday -- to claim tickets for reserved seating in the restaurant's dining and patio area. The restaurant's capacity is 450, and he expected that "we'll have every square foot filled up."
"There's definitely a buzz about town,"
Murphy said. "There's Carolina blue everywhere."
The Tar Heels are making their NCAA-record 18th trip to the Final Four, and they've won the championship four times -- most recently in 2005, when nearly 50,000 fans poured onto Franklin for a post-game party that lasted into the early morning hours.
"We have no reason to think it would be any smaller this year,"
said Chapel Hill Police Capt. Chris Blue. He said 330 officers from several law enforcement agencies would be on duty Monday night.
A few months ago, this is exactly how the faithful figured the season would end -- especially after four key players returned from last year's Final Four team, including Hansbrough, the reigning national player of the year. The Tar Heels were a 7?-point favorite Monday to claim the title.
North Carolina opened as the first team unanimously picked No. 1 in the preseason The Associated Press Top 25 since it began in 1981 and claimed a 35-point victory against this same Michigan State team -- on the same raised court at Ford Field, the home venue for the NFL's Detroit Lions -- in December.
Then, they rallied from an 0-2 start in ACC play to claim both the league's regular-season title and a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament for a third straight year. Along the way, Hansbrough set the career scoring records for both the school and the ACC, and Lawson won the league's player of the year award.
"I'm glad we're ending it the right way instead of, you know, my last practice being last week or something like that,"
Hansbrough told reporters in Detroit. "I'm just glad we're going out on the right note."
