David McCormack dominated Villanova, then won Kansas the national championship | Mike Sielski

NEW ORLEANS — The netting from the Superdome’s southern-side rim ringing his neck like a string of Bourbon Street beads, David McCormack held an odd smile on his face, a mix of daze and elation. His coach, Bill Self, had handed McCormack the net during the Kansas Jayhawks’ celebration of their 72-69 victory over North Carolina, after they followed up their 16-point rout of Villanova on Saturday with a 16-point comeback Monday night, the biggest rally in the history of the NCAA championship game.

McCormack, a 6-foot-10 senior forward, had been their best and most important player over those two games. His teammate Ochai Agbaji was named the Final Four’s most outstanding player, raining six three-pointers on Villanova without missing one, but McCormack had made more plays, made the biggest of Kansas’ big shots, and more than anyone had saved the Jayhawks from themselves. He was the one Self trusted most in the end. His back-to-back buckets in the closing two minutes — rebounding his own miss and flipping in a hook shot to give Kansas a one-point lead, then stretching that lead to three with a power move inside on the next possession — had been born of Self’s singling him out in the huddle: We’re going to throw it inside, and we trust you to deliver.

“I just prevailed,” said McCormack, who had 15 points and 10 rebounds Monday and 25 points and nine rebounds Saturday. “I made the basket happen.”

He was the most stable and stabilizing factor in a national title game in which it often appeared that any player who happened to be dribbling the basketball would go careening around the court, aimless and reckless and directionless, as if being chased by a swarm of bees. There was a raggedness to play all night, partly because so many North Carolina players — Armando Bacot, Caleb Love, and Brady Manek especially — either were nursing injuries or sustained them during the game, partly because Kansas seemed to just get crazy for no particular reason.

Up by three with 4.3 seconds left, the Jayhawks could have cost themselves the win when point guard Dajuan Harris stepped on the sideline after catching an inbounds pass, handing the ball back to the Tar Heels at midcourt. Had Love sunk his ensuing three-point attempt at the buzzer, it would have been a fitting cap to a Kansas performance that veered from wondrous to awful and back again.

Assuming he could bring himself to tune in to TBS on Monday night, Jay Wright had to be sick to his stomach throughout the first half, ruing the opportunity that he and the Wildcats had missed roughly 48 hours earlier.

“With the group of guys as experienced as this,” Kansas senior forward Mitch Lightfoot said, “it’s kind of hard to see us get rattled.”

Actually, it wasn’t at all, because the Jayhawks damn near fell apart in the first 20 minutes. They scored the game’s first seven points and still trailed by 15 at the break, going one-on-one too frequently on offense, rushing shots, making it clear that if Villanova had managed the stem the tide earlier in Saturday’s semifinal, that 81-65 final would have been, at a minimum, a hell of a lot closer.

At halftime, Self framed what might have seemed an insurmountable deficit as no big deal, referencing his 2008 team’s late surge to beat Memphis in the title game. “I said, ‘Which would be harder: being down nine with two minutes left or being down 15 with 20?’” Self said. “And they all said being down nine with two minutes left. So we can do this.” And McCormack displayed so much optimism that he puzzled his own teammates.

“He was looking at me, and I was like, ‘Why are you smiling, dude? We’re down 15,’” Kansas guard Christian Braun said. “He was telling me, like, ‘Keep your head up. Keep going. We’ll be all right.’ I was, like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I’ve ever been here before.’ Down 15 in a national-championship game? I’d definitely never been there. But we’re just proud of him, and he kept us going and then obviously hit a really big shot.”

Kansas and North Carolina had met in the NCAA Championship Game just once before, in 1957. It is regarded as a classic college basketball contest, and in it, Kansas’ gifted big man had 23 points and 14 rebounds, both of which were game-highs. The game entered one overtime, then another, then another, and as the third extra period neared its end, a Jayhawks player attempted to get the ball inside to the team’s star center. And with Wilt Chamberlain’s team down by one, the pass slipped through his hands, and North Carolina won 54-53. Sixty five years later, after so many mistakes, after so many times when it seemed the Kansas Jayhawks would let a championship slip away, David McCormack did what the Dipper could not. It was the difference.