Young versions of a spectacular matchup

NEWARK

In the game notes given to reporters Saturday, North Carolina and Kentucky are just as you picture them: College hoops royalty, with enough historical superlatives to fill several pages.

But in the real world inhabited by the participants in Sunday's NCAA East Regional final, these are not vintage representatives of either school's basketball tradition.

That partly is a matter of timing, because the rosters are loaded with key underclassmen and neither team was expected to get quite this far when the season began.

It also is a fact of modern college basketball life: Elite programs generally are populated by young players passing through on their way to the NBA draft lottery.

Kentucky is Exhibit A, of course. It got this far in 2010, then had five of its players drafted in the first round, four of them freshmen.

They got back by reloading with three new freshman starters who account for 56.8 percent of the scoring.

That helps explain why players on both sides generally shrugged off nuggets such as the fact that Kentucky (2,051) and Carolina (2,033) rank first and third in all-time major college victories.

Or that Carolina is No. 1 with 105 NCAA wins, followed by Kentucky with 104. (The Tar Heels lead 22-11 in the all-time series.)

"The names are on the front -- Kentucky-North Carolina, wow! -- but I don't think they are worried about that, and I am certainly not,'' Kentucky coach John Calipari said.

"I mean, it's not past history. These guys only remember two or three years, max.''

For Kentucky's returning players, that means recalling a supremely talented but immature team that lost to West Virginia in a regional final last March.

For Carolina, it means memories of a nightmarish 2009-10 in which it followed its run to a national championship by missing the NCAAs altogether.

The Tar Heels started this season 4-3 entering a Dec. 4 meeting with Kentucky. Before that game, a columnist for the Kentucky Kernel, a student paper, wrote this:

"The game doesn't exactly have the label of a potential Final Four matchup; many fans and pundits are willing to write this off as a marquee contest gone sour.''

North Carolina won that game, 75-73, and later got even better upon replacing Larry Drew with Kendall Marshall at point guard.

"There were a lot of people jumping off the ship,'' coach Roy Williams said, recalling the slow start. "I kept telling everybody this team will get better and better.''

Sunday's rematch is not a Final Four matchup, but the winner will end up there, after an Elite Eight game with a combined five freshman starters.

Then the inevitable questions about the NBA will come.

One reporter took a stab at it by asking Kentucky's freshmen what they thought of Ohio State star Jared Sullinger announcing Thursday night that he will return next season.

Nice try. Brandon Knight and Terrence Jones, the team's top scorers, stuck to talking points about having fun as collegians.

Doron Lamb, who is from Queens, did bite, saying, "I'll be back next year, so I'm not worried about leaving.''

Many fans have caught on to the fact that worrying about one-and-done stars isn't worth the trouble. Calipari himself doesn't fret over it anymore. He has embraced reality and made it work for him.

There is not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it does put a damper on big-picture history lessons at moments such as these.

Would someone please hand the players sets of game notes?

"You hear everyone talk about it and you kind of get a sense of it,'' Knight said of the historical context of the rivalry. "But as far as me experiencing it, I haven't.''