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There have been times since he arrived in Chapel Hill from Swannanoa, interrupted once by Kansas, when ol’ Roy said he just wasn’t that good, and there were times when you’d have to agree with him.

There were times this season when it looked as if Williams might not have a good handle on his own team, which some people said was the best in the nation three years ago, and there were times when you’d have to agree with them.

But if it took three years for this team to finally get it together, then that’s just the way the story will have to be remembered. And this is one story that will be told over and over again in this state.

North Carolina won its fifth NCAA men’s basketball tournament title Monday night, matching Indiana, and Roy Williams won his second national championship, matching Dean Smith.

“Let’s not go there,” he said in the hours leading to the title game in Detroit.

But we must. In this state, that’s how we keep score. Williams won this one in an 89-72 rout of Michigan State, but the title game was the culmination of a season that started months and even years earlier. He won it with a little luck and a lot of perseverance and, finally, with the innate timing the best basketball coaches have always had.

Williams watched anxiously as the season began in fits and starts, with Tyler Hansbrough in a walking cast and with Marcus Ginyard battling an injury that wouldn’t go away. He’d been through a long offseason in which four players considered going pro and all four came back. He saw his team lose its first two ACC games, only the second time that had happened in school history. He saw his freshman center, Tyler Zeller, break a wrist against Kentucky. He removed Greensboro’s Will Graves from the roster for violating team rules, and grudgingly came to terms with the sad fact that Ginyard wouldn’t play again this season, either.

Williams cursed more than he had in his life. He threw off his coat at Duke when Hansbrough failed to call out a pick for a teammate. He profanely accused his players of being weak in their full-court defense after a nine-point win over State at home.

“I’ve never had a team go through so much,” Williams would say over and over.

“He cusses a lot more in practice,” Hansbrough said after the State game.

And then Williams saw his point guard pull up lame in the final days of the regular season.

The championship game was a wonder to watch, a game designed for a team that didn’t even exist when the season began, a game that unfolded from weeks out when it became apparent that Williams had timed his leap perfectly, holding back injured Ty Lawson until he could hold him no longer, unleashing all the talent he had for one last run, a run that looked inevitable from the moment UNC hit the floor in Greensboro for the first game of the NCAA tournament.

The president had already picked the Tar Heels, something Williams lamented as a waste of time in the shadow of more pressing matters. The experts anointed Carolina even in the days after its ignominious loss in the ACC tournament. And the entire state of North Carolina sat back and watched it all unfold, finally, after three years and the losses to George Mason on the first weekend in ’06 and Georgetown on the second weekend in ’07 and Kansas in the 2008 Final Four and Boston College and Wake Forest and Maryland and finally, Florida State in this year’s conference tournament.

The conference turned out to be pretty good after all, and while people were still focused on the losses and the fact that so much talent had been pushed to the very brink of elimination after so many years of coming so close, Williams simply asked his players for a six-game winning streak. There would be no more ACC games, he told them. No more trips to insane places such as Cameron Indoor Stadium or Joel Coliseum. There would be no more trips to Raleigh or College Park.

Williams convinced Lawson to take a game off to open the run, then turned his team loose on the nation. The truth was, the Heels would see no more teams like the ones they’d already beaten. The truth was, the ACC really was better than the Big East. The truth was, the NCAA tournament was just the next six games. The last six games.

They were a season unto themselves, one that started with Lawson on the bench with a toe injury and an easy win over Radford, a game Williams admitted later was a walkover.

“No disrespect to Radford,” he added.

Carolina then beat LSU with Lawson scoring 21 in the best second half in recent NCAA history to lead the team out of Greensboro and onto the national stage.

In Memphis, the Heels routed Gonzaga and Oklahoma to earn their NCAA-record 18th trip to the Final Four. The regional wins were convincing and one-sided, and as the tournament entered its final week, the Heels suddenly were prohibitive favorites.

Williams was asked about the mentality of being North Carolina heading into a Final Four with the weight of expectations. He brought up the specter of the 8-20 season before he returned from Kansas to make sure 8-20 never happened again.

“I think our fans, our people, understand that that can happen even in North Carolina if you don’t get lucky and have people work very hard,” Williams said.

The wins over Villanova and Michigan State were stunning, as impressive a Final Four as any team has had in many years, a pair of wins by a team that looked like championship teams used to look, with seniors and juniors and waves of talent off the bench, with a Hall of Fame coach finally letting his team go free in a modern display of classic college basketball.

In the end, the team with “North Carolina” on its chest won the games. In the end, the team with the kid from Swannanoa on the bench won the title again.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com