Jay Wright

Villanova experienced a wide swing in its level of play all season, from the embarrassing 18-point home loss to Columbia in November to the March win over Georgetown - its third over a top-five team, which enabled the Wildcats to virtually punch their ticket to the NCAA tournament. Even though two of their weakest areas were exposed in Friday night's 78-71 NCAA South Regional loss to North Carolina that ended their season in Kansas City, Mo., the Wildcats look ahead with optimism after posting a seven-win improvement over the previous year and returning to the tournament.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Villanova did what it does every game. It tried. But trying wasn't enough against North Carolina on Friday night, and although the Wildcats made it more of a game than the Tar Heels wanted, they didn't complete the Philly sweep of second-round NCAA tournament games. Down by 20 in the first half, Villanova fought back to take a one-point lead midway through the second but couldn't keep the outcome from slipping though its hands in the final minutes. So, it won't be three for the show come Sunday, when Temple and La Salle will be playing for a berth in the Sweet 16 round.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - He played his last game as he did so many of the others, with unending hustle and an undying spirit. This was it for 6-foot-10, 250-pound Villanova senior Mouphtaou Yarou, who ended his career with another strong effort, scoring 17 points and grabbing eight rebounds during the Wildcats' 78-71 loss to North Carolina in a second-round NCAA South Regional game at the Sprint Center. During his time at Villanova, Yarou was as respected as much for his genial personality and leadership as he was for his game.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - College basketball teams fight all season to get to the NCAA tournament and, for the lucky ones that make it, that's when they start to find out how lucky they really are. Villanova, which needed some good fortune and a few nice upsets to get this far, has run into what every coach fears at this time of year - an unpromising matchup. It isn't that North Carolina, which the Wildcats play Friday evening to open their tournament, is a powerhouse or even in the same class as some of the better Tar Heels teams.

A 7-foot-1 backup center for the 1985 national champion Villanova Wildcats, Chuck Everson said there is a series of four questions that everyone always asks him. "People come up to me and the first thing they say to me is, 'How tall are you?' " Everson said. "I tell them, and they say, 'Do you play basketball?' I tell them. 'Where do you play?' I tell them, and they say, 'Were you on that team?' And I say yeah. " "Then I hear everybody's story about where they were the night we beat Georgetown," he added.

DAYTON, Ohio - After his team's stirring victory Wednesday over Boise State, La Salle coach John Giannini remarked that "there's no better feeling in life than making other people happy. " He was talking about the joy La Salle fans must have felt after the team's first NCAA Tournament win in 23 years. One of those supporters, Temple coach Fran Dunphy, stepped to the very same podium, in fact the very same seat, less than 12 hours later. Dunphy, a La Salle alum, is in Dayton getting his team ready to play North Carolina State in a second-round game Friday.

TO APPRECIATE THE depth of Jay Wright's accomplishment this season, first consider this: Villanova lost its point guard, Maalik Wayns, as an early entrant to the NBA, after a 13-win season overall, with five wins in the Big East. Wayns' replacement, true freshman Ryan Arcidiacono, will never play in the NBA; in fact, Arch, as he is called, missed his senior season at Neshaminy High last season due to back surgery, so playing in college never was a guarantee. And, while Arch might possess 2 percent of the team's cumulative athletic ability, he possesses about 50 percent of the team's cumulative basketball IQ. Nevertheless, the chief marionette guided by Wright's masterful hand, Arch, as true freshman, led the Wildcats to a 20-win regular season, 10 Big East wins, a win in the Big East Tournament . . . And, Sunday, a berth in the NCAA Tournament as a No. 9 seed against No. 8 North Carolina.

There has been a lot of heartfelt testimony recently about the greatness of the Big East basketball conference, whose member schools will split apart next season to form or join hoops leagues that won't be nearly as great. Because it is something of a poignant passing, the testimony has mostly been about the camaraderie among the teams, about the tradition that reaches back to the Big East's birthing by Providence athletic director Dave Gavitt, and about the singular philosophy of believing in basketball even in the great shadow of the hungry football ogre.

ALL TONY CHENNAULT wanted to do was contribute. But early in the season, the 6-2 guard from Neumann-Goretti High wasn't giving Villanova's young basketball team nearly enough. Which, for someone who had averaged nine points and 30 minutes as a starting sophomore at Wake Forest the year before, was puzzling. What wasn't well-known was that Chennault - who received an NCAA hardship waiver in June that granted him immediate eligibility after he transferred to be closer to his ailing mother - happened to be going through some difficult times.

When Villanova stood at 13-9 after the first weekend of February, it was looking at a second consecutive year away from the NCAA tournament and probably many raised eyebrows from critics wondering whether the program was losing its mojo four years removed from a Final Four appearance. But coach Jay Wright thought he had a team that was improving, one that always recovered after bad stretches. The Wildcats won seven games the rest of the way, including quality victories over Marquette and Georgetown, and learned Sunday that they would be returning to the NCAA tournament.