MEMPHIS – If you are worried about the pro-Kentucky crowd here, the Wildcats being at the top of their game with 13 straight wins and how the Tar Heels can stop De’Aaron Fox (who was unstoppable against UCLA Friday night) and Malik Monk (who was unstoppable against UNC back in December with 47 points), consider this:

Las Vegas has Carolina a 2½-point favorite. Whaaaaat?

Must be because Kentucky has Bluegrass but the Tar Heels have blood lines. As in Luke Maye, perhaps the best-kept secret in college basketball. Maye’s father, Mark, was a record-smashing quarterback for the football Tar Heels and his mother, Aimee, was an all-state basketball player in high school. Luke had more than 1,900 points and more than 1,300 rebounds at Hough High School in Cornelius, outside of Charlotte.

How he wound up in Chapel Hill was one of the more endearing stories Roy Williams told after his team’s 92-80 win over Butler, advancing to the 27th regional final in UNC history. Maye had his college career night with 16 points, 12 rebounds, two assists and a steal in 25 minutes. That nine of those points came on three jumpers from beyond the arc makes Luuuuke a valuable weapon for the 6-8, 225-pound sophomore, who can pick and pop out to square up and fire. He can also pick and roll, where he also scores from inside and grabs almost half of his 130 rebounds on the season off the offensive glass.

Though Maye has literally improved in leaps and bounds, he is no surprise to Williams. “Not at all,” ol’ Roy said after his team’s 30th win of the season (30-7) and his personal 30th victory as a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament win (30-4).

“He came to our camp for five or six years, and I kept telling Mark, ‘don’t be in a hurry’ because I think he’s going to be good enough.’”

Williams had offered out all of his scholarships by the spring of 2015 and asked Maye to come as a walk-on for one year. “I told Luke I wanted him to come,” Williams said, that “you can really be a good player for us, and extremely important player for us.

“The dumbest thing I said was don’t have your feelings hurt, but I’d like you to come here first year and pay your own way, then we’ll give you a scholarship the rest of the way.”

Williams didn’t get all the kids he had offered, resulting in “one of the neatest phone calls ever. I called Luke one night and said I want you to go in to your mom and dad and asked them for a thousand dollars to go to the beach and blow it this weekend.”

When Maye said he didn’t think he could do that, Williams said, “Well tell them I just gave you a $25,000 scholarship for next year so at least they ought to be able to give you a thousand to blow. He had some fun with it. I always thought Luke was going to be really good . . . he has the ability to shoot the ball. He has the ability to rebound the ball, but the reason Luke is going to be successful is what he has in his brain and his heart.”

You see heart when he battles sometimes bigger opponents and comes down with the ball because he has a nose for it. And you know he’s got a brain by matching his father with All-ACC Academic honors for two straight years. In high school, Maye made National Honor Society, Math Honor Society and French Honor Society. Bien joué!

To defeat Kentucky and return to the Final Four a second straight year, Carolina will need Maye, Joel Berry (26 points) and Justin Jackson (24 points) to play as well as they did against Butler, have Kennedy Meeks score more than five points and match his 11 rebounds and for Isaiah Hick and Tony Bradley to play more than 23 minutes without foul trouble.

Guarding the mercurial lefty Fox, who with spindly legs and darting speed plays like his name, will by committee – some Berry, some Britt, some Seventh. And we’ll see if Theo Pinson, who missed the 103-100 loss, can hold Monk to at least half of the 47 he scored against the Heels in Vegas. And the Carolina “bigs” have to play bigger than ever against Bam Adebayo and Kentucky’s array of size underneath.

CBS and the NCAA got the dream match-up they wanted in determining the last Final Four team late Sunday afternoon, and the well-traveled Wildcat fans will certainly make FedEx Forum seem more like a home court. But Kentucky coach John Calipari, who bolted the University of Memphis for Lexington after losing the 2008 national championship game in overtime, still has many hard-feeling fans here. And extra Tar Heels who did not get tickets from the Rams Club will find their way into the third Elite Eight game between these basketball powers (UNC is 2-1 in those and leads Kentucky 23-15 in the overall series dating back to Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith).

This is the big one, a ninth chance for Williams to do what he loves more than anything – have hundreds of other coaches watch him conduct the open practice on Friday of the Final Four. It won’t be easy against a second-seeded and fifth-ranked Kentucky team playing its best basketball.

“At this stage of the year, we do need to be clicking a little bit on all cylinders,” he said.

Indeed.