San Antonio — Now maybe Kansas fans can forgive Roy Williams for leaving.

The Jayhawks beat North Carolina 84-66 Saturday in the Final Four semifinals in a game that featured two stunning swings.

Kansas moves into the finals Monday against Memphis, which blasted UCLA in the other semifinal. Carolina finishes its season 36-3.

"We played great early, as good as we can play," Kansas coach Bill Self said. "And then we went brain-dead. ... And then we finished strong."

A close game between Carolina and Kansas, where Williams coached for 15 years until leaving for UNC five years ago, was expected.

But the disciplined, talented Jayhawks were dominant at the start. Carolina looked tight from the beginning – the faces of players like Tyler Hansbrough and Ty Lawson looking ultra-serious from the start – and the Tar Heels lacked their usual spark.

Carolina couldn’t work the ball into Hansbrough, couldn’t force KU into turnovers and get a running game going – and couldn’t dent the Kansas defense.

"They came after me with a lot of people," Hansbrough said of the KU defense. "It's what every team has been doing. They did a particularly good job of it."

With freshman Brandon Rush leading a balanced offense, the Jayhawks led 40-12 at one point in the first half.

"They jumped on us. They hit us between the eyes," Ellington said. "We were too casual."

Kansas led 42-27 at the half and score the first basket of the second half, seeming to indicate that their dominance would continue.

But Carolina roared back in the second half, slashing the Kansas lead to 54-50 on a driving basket by Ellington.

The Tar Heels kept pushing, with Hansbrough working inside for shots, Ellington contributing slashing moves and jumpers and Danny Green coming off the bench to have a terrific second half.

Carolina cut the Kansas lead to 58-53 and then 64-59 on a driving score by Hansbrough.

But the Jayhawks, in their first Final Four under coach Bill Self, responded with a three-pointer by guard Collins. Ellington scored on a brilliant shot for UNC, pushing the ball off his hip and banking it in, but Kansas roared in front.

Rush, a junior who played at Mount Zion in Durham, scored on a drive and then tossed a beautiful lob to Darnell Jackson for a score.

Rush finished with 25 points and seven rebounds. Ellington led Carolina with 18 points.

Kansas (36-3) moved within a win of its first national championship since 1988, the year before Williams began his storied 15-year tenure in Lawrence - one that ended when he jilted Kansas for his alma mater.

Williams stood stoically as the clock ticked down, arms folded, nothing much left he could do. Tears usually come pretty quickly after the final buzzer of the season for him, and this season ended one game short of where many thought it might.

Still, at game's end he walked to the Kansas bench and shook every player's hand, hugging many of them. But the loss was a tough one for Williams, whose team was ranked No. 1 much of the season and featured exceptional chemistry.

"This team was really a special team," he said. "We had no issues, no problems. We had great kids. They were fun, fun to coach. And in some ways, that makes it hurt more."

Hansbrough, the national player of the year, finished with 17 points and nine rebounds - a typically gutsy effort.

But for all their effort, Carolina lost this game early.

The basket looked as big as the Alamo for the Jayhawks, who made 12 of their first 16 shots and went on an 18-0 run for a 33-10 lead with 9:31 left.

Meanwhile, North Carolina went a stunning 9:03 without a basket and the lead got as large as 40-12. It was around then that none other than Billy Packer, the CBS analyst, to remark with the score 38-12, “This game is over.”

“Is it?” asked Jim Nantz of CBS.

“Yes, it is,” Packer said.

No, it was not.

The Tar Heels turned this into controlled chaos over the first 10 minutes of the second half, altering Kansas shots and making pretty much everything they threw up - including an Ellington 3-pointer with 9:20 left that made it 58-53 and had the Tar Heels in a frenzy.

Throughout the rally, Self called time-out after time-out - KU fans often criticized Williams for not doing the same under those circumstances - and eventually, North Carolina cooled and Kansas ran away.

Picking a Jayhawks star was as easy as closing your eyes and pointing to a name on the stat sheet.

Freshman Cole Aldrich stood out, swatting three shots in the first half and altering more after coming off the bench en route to his eight-point, seven-rebound night. His highlight came after KU missed just its fifth shot of the game, more than 10 minutes into the first half, and he out-grappled Hansbrough for a rebound that resulted in two free throws. That made it 33-10.

Darrell Arthur had three buckets and an assist in the first five minutes to start the runaway. Russell Robinson had five points, four assists, three steals and three turnovers over the first 20 minutes - what coach wouldn't love that?

The list went on, and die-hard KU fans might have deemed it their team's best performance since the 2003 Final Four, when Nick Collison helped dismantle Marquette 94-61 in the semifinals.

Two nights later, the Jayhawks lost to Syracuse in the finals. With talk swirling that Williams would be headed to Tobacco Road, he said on live TV that he "could give a (bleep) about North Carolina right now."

Two weeks later, he was wearing Carolina blue.

He got out-coached in some ways in this one, especially at the beginning, finding no solution for Kansas' somewhat surprising strategy of dumping the ball inside to Arthur, Jackson and Aldrich and challenging Hansbrough.

Despite the impressive comeback, the final stats painted a picture of Kansas' domination. The Jayhawks shot 53 percent from the floor and held the nation's second-leading offense to 35 percent. They had nine more rebounds, 10 more assists, six more blocks.