Inside the Kansas Jayhawks' second-half comeback that stunned UNC for a basketball national championship

NEW ORLEANS — As he sat just a few rows behind the Kansas bench at the Caesars Superdome on Monday night, Mario Chalmers tried not to squirm.

The program he had led to the 2008 basketball national championship had entered halftime with a 15-point deficit. Chalmers, the hero of that team who hit a 3-pointer to send the game to overtime in a win against Memphis, hoped the Jayhawks would remember what was still possible.

«I just thought, 'Keep believing,'» Chalmers said after Kansas' 72-69 come-from-behind win over North Carolina. «The same thing Coach [Bill] Self told us [in 2008] was to keep believing. And I knew they'd be able to pull it out in the end.»

The line between the joy of a hard-fought victory and the agony of almost is thin. Self, who won his second national title on Monday, knows too well after a 2012 loss to Kentucky in the championship game and a lopsided defeat against Villanova in the 2018 Final Four. But his first national title team with Chalmers also had been down in the second half, albeit in a more dire and urgent scenario, so he challenged his 2022 players in the locker room.

«We were disappointed with how we played at halftime,» Self said after staging a 16-point comeback, the greatest deficit a winning team has overcome in the national championship game in NCAA history. «I told them, 'Would you rather be down 15 points at halftime or nine with [two minutes] left?' because that's what happened in '08. They all said 15.»

His players also looked around the locker room at one another and began to yell, «We're coming back! We're coming back!»

The comeback that saved a season — that further bolstered a longtime coach's legacy — was birthed in that moment. But there was more to it than flying bodies and