Roy Williams isn’t for everybody. The North Carolina basketball coach weeps a bit too easily for some of us and whines a bit too much for a few more of us.

During 15 years at Kansas, his teams came up short a few too many times despite outrageous talent.

But on an NCAA teleconference Monday afternoon, Williams told a story that would soften the heart of anyone who has previously questioned how tough it was for him to leave KU for Carolina Blue.

Said Williams, whose Tar Heels meet the Jayhawks around 8:45 Saturday night in the second Final Four semifinal — UCLA faces Memphis at 6:10 — “I can put it to you this way: In my summer camp we have a lot of little kids running around and they’re instructed on the first day they can wear North Carolina stuff or they can wear Kansas stuff, but they can’t wear anybody else’s stuff.

“And that’s the way I’m always going to be. I’m going to always be a huge Kansas fan. There were some things said or done that hurt at first, but time has a way of healing things and I am hopeful it will heal with some people that may still have some bad feelings.

“But the good news is it’s a wonderful Kansas team playing a wonderful North Carolina team on college basketball’s biggest stage. I just wish it would be Monday night as opposed to Saturday.”

If you believe, as KU coach Bill Self says, that the Jayhawks “are the fourth No. 1 seed,” then Memphis versus UCLA should be the better game on the floor. After all, the Jayhawks were the only one of the final four to win their regional title by fewer than 10 points. To make that worse, the team they beat — Davidson — was the only school to reach the Elite Eight with worse than a No. 3 seed. The Southern Conference champion was a No. 10 seed.

So all that talk all season that Kansas really hadn’t beaten anyone of note except for Texas has merit.

But the relative merits of the Jayhawks or Tar Heels is of little importance to CBS. It’s all about Roy Williams facing his old employer Kansas, whom he took to four Final Fours but no titles, losing in the championship game in both 1991 and 2003.

Even Self, who has struggled to please the same fans who adored Williams, said Monday, “It is a big deal. Fans will make a big deal out of it. As I said yesterday, when people are upset that you leave — and I’ve gone through this myself — it’s a backhanded compliment because they didn’t want you to go. But at the core, I would think everybody’s proud of the time he spent here because he gave this place 15 years of excellence.”

If you visit the Kansas City Star’s Web site (www.kansascity.com), you’ll find that while everybody may feel proud of Williams’ accomplishments, they aren’t exactly thrilled with how the marriage ended.

They remember the news conference in 2000 when Williams said he’d never coach anywhere else but Kansas. They remember the school passing out free Coca-Colas, which is his favorite drink.

And Williams didn’t replace UNC coach Bill Guthridge in 2000. Instead, he replaced Matt Doherty three years later, just after Kansas lost the national championship to Syracuse. Then he rubbed the Jayhawks’ beaks in it by directing the Tar Heels to their fourth national title two years later.

“We gave him his big break,” Aaron Schwindt told the newspaper. “He was nobody before us. We gave him his big break, and he just ditched us. So whatever.”

“It would be poetic to beat Roy and then win it all,” added Brian Stratman, a KU graduate from Bloomington, Ill. “Icing on the cake.”

This is not to say these same fans have welcomed Self with open arms. This is his first Final Four in his fifth season. By year five, Roy had gone twice. Moreover, the players he inherited didn’t immediately buy into his system.

“It’s different,” he said, “when you walk into a situation saying, ‘OK, guys, this is how we’re going to play and it works,’ when you haven’t won as much as the guy who played differently than that. It’s especially tough to live up to a guy that goes to back-to-back Final Fours and wins 80 percent of his games.”

And it gets even tougher when you lose two straight years in the opening round of the tournament, as Self’s Jayhawks did in 2005 and ’06.

So it’s completely understandable that while Self might rather discuss his current team than all these questions about following Williams, he’s also more than a little happy to reach the Final Four for the first time in his career after guiding three different schools — Tulsa, Illinois and Kansas — to regional finals.

“I’ll deal with anything,” Self said. “You could put me answering questions in a dark room with the bright light shining on me for eight hours a day, and I’d still love every second of it.”

And Williams insists that he still loves his old school.

“People pass me in the airport and say, “Rock Chalk, Jayhawk,” Williams said. “And I say, ‘Go, KU.’”

But not this Saturday night.