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RALEIGH -- Just over 11 minutes into North Carolina's game against Mount St. Mary's, UNC's road to the Final Four in San Antonio got a lot easier. Sophomore point guard Ty Lawson took an inbounds pass after a Mountaineers basket and put on the afterburners. He zoomed the length of the floor, got to the baseline and made a short fadeaway jumper. The sequence took all of seven seconds.

"That's when I felt like it was going to be a good day," Lawson said. "My ankle was feeling good."

That's when UNC's national title prospects -- which already looked pretty rosy -- got even better. In searching for some sort of weakness in the Tar Heels, the one that has been seized upon the most is that Carolina isn't quite the same team if Lawson is hampered by his left ankle injury. While senior point guard Quentin Thomas did an admirable job filling in for Lawson, Thomas doesn't have that one special dimension Lawson has -- the ability to get a few easy baskets per game with pure speed.

It's an ability that becomes even more invaluable during the NCAA tournament, when every possession and every point becomes magnified. So you can imagine the giddiness of the UNC fan base when, later in the Mount St. Mary's game, Lawson executed a 360 spin at full speed for a fastbreak layup.

"I'm real surprised," Lawson said afterward. "That spin move, I thought was going to hurt just a little bit. But it didn't hurt that much."

Roy Williams, like any college basketball coach, could still find the gray cloud in an otherwise sunny outlook for Lawson.

"What did he have to do to make that move that everybody was excited about?" Williams asked. "He had to spin. Six weeks ago, what would he have done? That guy wouldn't have caught him."

"That's a little bit rough," Lawson said of Williams' analysis, before conceding that maybe his coach might have a point.

Regardless, it's clear that Lawson has come a long, long way since he injured the ankle at Florida State on Feb 3. Heck, he's made tremendous strides since the second time UNC played the Seminoles, on Mar. 4. In that game, Lawson scored 10 points but floated on the perimeter and even did the unthinkable, pulling up on a fast break for a jumper instead of plunging headlong toward the basket. Afterward, he wondered if he would ever get back somewhere close to normal this season.

"It just kept hurting and I couldn't do the thing I normally do," he said.

While Lawson was wondering, so too were nervous Carolina fans. Ankle injuries are notoriously fickle. Sometimes they keep players out for a game, sometimes the rest of a season. Threads began to pop up on the message boards, theorizing that maybe Lawson wasn't really that hurt. Maybe he was protecting himself so he wouldn't risk a more serious injury that could damage his status for the NBA draft this year.

"Anybody who thought that was a fool," Lawson said, "because I love playing basketball and I want to win. I want to win an NCAA tournament championship. That's my goal right now, and I plan to stay here until I do it."

That's a goal that now appears very reachable, now that Lawson keeps moving closer to full speed. In some ways, UNC actually became a better team while Lawson was out. Quentin Thomas got the minutes he needed to build his confidence, a development that gives the Tar Heels a solid backup point guard. Tyler Hansbrough, already a great player, lifted his game even higher to pick up the slack.

Still, Lawson's importance was reinforced when his play in the second half against Clemson helped lift UNC to its second straight ACC tournament title.

"That's the Ty we need," Marcus Ginyard said.

It looks like, from this point forward, that's the Ty the Tar Heels have.

Contact Jim Young at 373-7016 or jim.young@news-record.com