I'm sitting here watching Virginia Tech hang in there against Number One North Carolina in the ACC tourney semis, and the thing that keeps crossing my mind (other than: My GOD the refs protect Tyler Hansbrough! He consistently initiates the contact, and yet the foul is called on the defender; my only consolation is that he won't get that treatment in the NBA) is this: Why am I not rooting harder for Carolina to lose?

As a Kansas native and graduate of the University, by the Generally Accepted Principles of Collegiate Fandom As Codified by Will Blythe, I should be happy to see Carolina fail. Tar Heel coach  Roy Williams is, of course, the man who broke the hearts of Kansas fans in 2003 when, after 15 fine years as the Jayhawks head coach (and, oh by the way, no national championships) fled for the Carolina job just days after his team lost to Syracuse in the national title game. Perhaps the most irked were his players--"I gave my right arm for that man," said forward Wayne Simien, who played much of that season with an injured shoulder, and there were plenty of bad feelings all around.

Much of this, it must be said, is rooted in the insecurity that comes with being a Kansas fan. After all, if the program is such a good job, why would anyone want to leave? Except that, compared to North Carolina, or Duke, or UCLA, um, maybe it isn't. Unlike all the other traditional college basketball powers, Kansas is located in a rapidly depopulating state (the island of Manhattan, my current home, has more people residing along its 13-mile length than live in my home state), with little local talent to draw on. Recruiting is always a hassle (though Lawrence has its charms, they're mostly hidden in February, when the daily weather forecast is always some variation on this theme: "Gray. Cloudy. 19 degrees. Wind. Blowing. No relief. Freezing rain. Hope fading. Remember sunshine? What happened to that? Oh for the love of God, where did the sun go?"), and there's a real feeling that all it would take is two bad years for Kansas to fall into a permanent second-tier funk. Remember when Holy Cross was a national basketball power? Yeah, me neither.

So, you know, the stakes are high. Now, though, it's five years later, Williams is beloved at North Carolina (where he finally did win that championship) and Kansas is coached by Bill Self, who, despite the fact that he has an entirely different coaching style, has pulled off the very neat trick of replicating both the regular season success and the postseason stumbles that characterized the Williams era. Me? I'm a fan, sure, but a subdued one. I've been hurt before. (As a side note, isn't it wonderful that now, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I can watch all those wrenching tournament losses all over again? Yeah.) I've become more philosophical ("I appreciate that they're well-coached, and play hard, and are fun to watch") and, unlike my brother-in-blogging Devin Gordon, I no longer refer to my University's team as "we."

Of course, that could change with a good tournament run. Check back with me in a couple of weeks.