LAWRENCE, Kan. -- There might as well be a dividing line here down the middle of Naismith Drive.

On one side of the street are the haters, the drive-by mother truckers who would prefer to see Roy Williams and his power-blue suit in a skeet-shooting contest. As a target.

People in Kansas haven't forgotten how Roy Williams left KU so suddenly. (Getty Images)

Until, perhaps, the ball is tipped in Saturday's national semifinal between Kansas and North Carolina.

"I've heard both," said Janet Muggy, relaxing in a chair in the Jayhawk Bookstore that has been owned by her husband for 31 years. "Half of the people I have visited with ... are over it. The other half, especially the young people say, 'Are you going to have a 'Hate Roy' shirt?'"

There are some good ones out there already reminding loyal Jayhawks everywhere that Roy Williams was disloyal when he sprinted for Carolina in 2003.

Beat the Tar out of Benedict Williams

Kansas, the birthplace of North Carolina basketball

And of course ...

"I don't give a sh*t about North Carolina"

Those famous words were uttered by Williams to Bonnie Bernstein on CBS after losing in the 2003 Final Four. A few days later he was introduced at Carolina.

Yeah, that didn't hurt at all.

"I was mad. I was very hot," said Jeremy Case, a Kansas senior guard, the only current Jayhawk with ties to Williams. "I can imagine how people felt on campus, even angrier than I was."

That day five years ago, Kansas players emerged from a meeting they thought would never take place. After 15 years, Williams said goodbye to Kansas, spouting the same words he uses today.

"I gave my heart and soul," Williams said.

"I gave my right arm for him, literally," Jayhawk Wayne Simien said, his arm in a sling from shoulder surgery.

But it was so much more than that. In 2000, Kansas staged an elaborate news conference at the football stadium to announce that, essentially, nothing had happened. Kansas was keeping its coach. But by then Williams had become an institution. Williams' waffling between Kansas and Carolina was played out publicly until Williams uttered some other famous words.

"I'm stayin'"

Other coaches, other schools would have issued a press release. Not Williams and not Kansas. The announcement was shown on the stadium's video board to a crowd announced officially as 16,300 (capacity of Allen Fieldhouse).

You can see why Naismith Drive is divided. Heart and soul vs. a body part with a declaration of loyalty mixed in the middle.

"More people hate Dean than are hating Roy," one Kansas loyalist said. "He said he didn't talk to Roy. That's malarkey."

That would be Dean Smith, the North Carolina coaching legend and -- at least to some fans -- the behind-the-scenes manipulator who brought Williams back "home." Why does that hurt here? Smith, if you didn't know, is a Kansas native who played on Phog Allen's 1952 national championship team.

Call it a push, though. Kansas fans tend to forget that Smith also recommended the then-unknown Williams for the job to athletic director Bob Frederick in 1988.

Fifteen years later, in 2003, Case was an early signee. He and his parents didn't even think to ask if Williams would be around throughout Case's career.

"We didn't think he was going to leave," said Case, a reserve who has averaged 1.8 points in his career. "The first reaction was wow, I can't believe this. I was mad, I was upset."

Aaron Hoare was in school then, a native New Zealander who came a long way to play club rugby at Kansas. When the announcement came down, there were some friends who knew where Williams lived. They were about to take chalk and scrawl "Traitor" on the curb in front of Williams' home, but the idea fizzled.

"I don't blame the guy for going home," said Hoare, who now works at Johnny's, a Lawrence landmark bar near downtown. "That's why everyone felt betrayed. I don't think he would have won a national title here. His players that he has at North Carolina are different than the ones he was recruiting here.

"Here he had more of a student-athlete, whereas at North Carolina they're a little bit more driven on the Tobacco Road."

Those statements should spark a discussion, but let's move farther down the bar.

"I think some of that (bitterness) has worn off, waned a little bit," said Erin Leary, another Johnny's employee who was a sophomore when Kansas last went to the Final Four in 2003.

"It stung a little bit when he left. The second year at Carolina they won the championship. That was kind of like, 'Oh really?' I might be singing a different tune if we don't win on Saturday."

I don't know about other basketball heavens, but at Kansas they do things like this: Leary has some friends from Minneapolis coming into town this weekend to watch their alma mater. On television. In the Lawrence bars -- 780 miles from San Antonio.

"The most fun we had in college was Final Four weekend," she said.

The matchup was inevitable. Two of the best programs in the nation were never going to meet in the regular season (Williams' stated policy since he left), but their excellence made it only a matter of time before they met in the tournament.

Williams had met Carolina twice in the tournament while at Kansas. Both games left him about as uncomfortable as wearing a wool suit in July. Now it's going to happen again, in reverse.

"It was a wonderful place," Williams said of Kansas. "The surprise to me was the passion. I'm a guy that grew up in North Carolina, never left North Carolina.

"I got out there and found out that they had not exaggerated at all. Kansas basketball was even more important to the people than I imagined."

It's a good thing that Bill Self is so easy going. Early on, he was compared to Williams at every turn. It's laughable now that fans and players were concerned about Self's perceived walk-it-up style. This Kansas team can play any style imaginable and is 12th nationally in scoring 80.6 per game.

"I felt like from Day 1 it was our team," Self said. "I loved coaching the players that were here before. But it's different when you walk into a situation saying, 'OK guys, this is how we're going to play, and it works ...' They've heard two voices, and one voice was very, very successful."

Self has his own abandonment issues. He had recruited the foundation of a team at Illinois that would reach the national championship game (against Carolina) in 2005.

"When people are upset that you leave ..." Self said, "it's a back-handed compliment because they didn't want you to."

Kansas Nation again is wringing its hands. Five years to the week that Williams weighed his decision, Self faces his own going-back-home decision. His alma mater Oklahoma State just fired Sean Sutton. Oklahoma State isn't North Carolina, but it could become attractive if booster T. Boone Pickens offers $3 million-$4 million per year.

For now, Self is loved. It took him parts of those five years, but the fans who questioned the newcomer because he wasn't Williams now can't wait for him to beat the pants off Ol' Roy.

"Those people need to realize that other than taxes, nothing lasts forever," Muggy said. "Roy gave us a good run. I think we just about milked everything out of Roy that we could."

"All my feelings I let them go, I wished him well," Case said of Williams.

As for Roy and Bill? They have never really sat down and talked about it, which is amazing. What stories they could tell about how their lives, careers and two changed programs.

"It's not anything unfriendly," Self said. "We never have got together over soda or anything and talked about what all has transpired.

"But we talked about doing it."

Some time after Saturday.