If you were the type to gamble on college basketball — and you really shouldn’t, unless it’s with someone else’s money — then it seems a safe bet that North Carolina and Arizona will play for a trip to the Final Four on Saturday.

Because there’s one rule of the NCAA Tournament that remains inviolable, and it’s that CBS tends to get what CBS wants, especially when it comes to North Carolina.

And CBS wants to see the Tar Heels play Caleb Love.

That’s not to imply anything nefarious. There’s no fix here. In all of the many, many years that North Carolina has played Kentucky or Kansas in the tournament, it’s almost always what the seeding would dictate. No intervention, divine or otherwise, was required — other than in 2022, but KU-UNC wasn’t even the highest-rated game at that Final Four. A semifinal was, and it wasn’t Kansas-Villanova.

(If there’s a miracle at work here, it’s that Kentucky wasn’t the No. 3 seed in the West Region. And that Kansas wasn’t the No. 4. That would have been the dream UNC bracket for the ad sales team at Black Rock. )

That remains true of a potential North Carolina-Arizona matchup. The Tar Heels are the No. 1 seed. Arizona is the No. 2 seed. Ipso facto, they’re expected to play. This is where it’s supposed to end for one or the other.

So just like Butler and UCLA in Memphis in 2017, both of which made way for a UNC-UK matchup that turned out to be one of the most memorable regional finals of all time, Alabama and Clemson are in supporting roles in Los Angeles, a place where there’s a long tradition of character actors thriving before ceding the spotlight to their top-billed peers.

CBS may not have sent its top broadcast team to L.A. — Ian Eagle, Bill Raftery and Grant Hill will be in Dallas with Duke and N.C. State — but it took those games on Thursday, and surely will again Saturday night.

This would be the single most anticipated matchup of the entire tournament so far, and for good reason.

Under any circumstances, a star player colliding with his former school would make for good television, but there’s so much more piled onto this: The shot to beat Duke in 2022, UNC’s collapse in 2023, Love’s exit for Arizona (and win over Duke at Cameron in November with “Tar Heel 4L” written on his shoes), UNC’s resurgence without him, Love being named player of the year in the Pac-12, R.J. Davis earning the same honors in the ACC.

“To go their separate ways,” North Carolina’s Armando Bacot said, “it worked out for both of them.”

The Caleb Love Dialogue that has been going on for three years in Chapel Hill, before and after his departure, is layered and not always nuanced, but it is, in the end, inconclusive. North Carolina won with him and has now won without him. A streaky, high-volume shooter is always going to be a polarizing figure, boom or bust. The Love discussion remains impossible to escape, even now.

Davis and Bacot were talking about Love, and the implication of a potential meeting down the road, before the ACC tournament even started, before the bracket came out with this collision course embedded within. That’s how deep this runs.

That makes for high stakes, even without a trip to the Final Four on the line. It also makes for good television.

Clemson and Alabama still have the opportunity to throw a wrench into this, just like Butler and UCLA, and just like Clemson and Syracuse did in Omaha in 2018 when Duke and Kansas seemed predestined to meet. In both cases, the game everyone wanted to see turned out to be worth seeing.

It’s hard to imagine, with so much on the line and feelings running so deep, North Carolina and Arizona being a dud, if it comes to that.

Sometimes, the basketball gods know what’s good for ratings.

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