LAWRENCE, Kan. — This much ballyhooed, much-anticipated, much-celebrated meeting Friday night between Kansas and North Carolina — one whose climactic 92-89 final in favor of the home team featured multiple late lead changes and a missed 3-pointer as time expired — seemed headed for a letdown, and looked for the longest time like the game itself might actually be the only disappointing thing about the whole experience.

Because everything else was awesome: the build-up, the hype, the decibel level inside Allen Fieldhouse, where students had been waiting for this for days; waiting for this monumental meeting between two of college basketball’s original and oldest members of its royal family.

But then there was the game, itself, and let’s be honest: It was, for a while, pretty meh. Anticlimactic, perhaps, is the more accurate word — that after all of this (gestures everywhere, from James Naismith to Phog Allen to Dean Smith to Roy Williams) it seemed headed for a blowout.

How sad that would’ve been. How unfair, maybe, given the rarity of this kind of meeting.

The Jayhawks led by 20 late in the first half and by 15 at halftime, and you could already hear the Take Machine revving up on social media: that Carolina has just lost a step; that something about its program is just a little off; that Kansas understands this modern era and UNC doesn’t; that the Heels whiffed on the transfer portal and the Jayhawks didn’t; that UNC is slip sliding away.

And sure: it looked like that at halftime. It looked like Kansas coach Bill Self was the basketball savant, worthy of coaching in a building that literally has Naismith’s original rules of basketball (or “Basket Ball,” as he wrote it at the time) preserved in a wall in a concourse upstairs. And it looked like Hubert Davis, indeed, was a coach who missed out on all of his most coveted off-season targets.

But then it was something like fate or magic or both. It was as if Naismith and Phog and Dean Smith themselves all came together wherever they might be in their eternity and convened; like they agreed on some kind of Higher Power intervention: That no, it couldn’t go down like it looked like it was going to go down in the first half. That these teams could do better than that, couldn’t they?

And so here came the Tar Heels, chipping away and chipping away. Nerves growing and the margin shrinking. It was a six-point game five minutes into the second half, and then a three-point game with eight and a half minutes left and then UNC had the lead, by one, on a Jae’Lyn Withers layup with seven minutes to play.

And then from there it was pretty much bedlam, the crowd living and dying with every swing, a smattering of UNC fans jumping upon the Tar Heels’ moments of good fortune and the home fans roaring when Kansas came back. For the final seven minutes, neither team led by more than four points and it was usually much closer than that.

When Kansas’ Hunter Dickinson made one of two free throws with 17 seconds to play, Kansas led by three, and the Tar Heels had a chance. Elliot Cadeau brought the ball up the court and dribbled — and dribbled — until he attempted a rushed and off-balance 3-pointer from just in front of the UNC bench. It bounced off the rim and this place went mad again, and a love letter to college basketball was over.

With cruelty, for the Tar Heels.

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