St. Louis ? They never will say never again about Roy Williams.

They never will say he can’t win the big one.

They never will say he’s a good system coach, but not a good game coach.

They never will say he’s 0-for-the-Final-Four.

They will say he’s a champion.

North Carolina won the national title against Illinois, 75-70, Monday night, losing all of a 15-point lead, then scoring the final five points to set off a jubilant celebration. The first player to get to Williams and hug him was Sean May, the finest player in the NCAA Tourney this year. May, a junior center, squeezed Williams like he was an orange, but Williams was flying by then and didn’t feel a thing.

“I just wanted to hug that big rascal as long as I could hug him,” Williams said.

Williams’ voice broke in his first interview after the championship, with CBS, but his team was not broken Monday. Williams coached a masterful game when it mattered most. The coach kept making the right little decisions — playing Raymond Felton through his foul trouble, switching to a zone to give Illinois a different look, shoving the ball inside to May even when Illinois double-teamed him.

After returning home to resurrect the program in 2003, it took Williams only two seasons to take his alma mater to the national title. He did it by melding great talent he mostly inherited from Matt Doherty into an unselfish team. The Tar Heels led the nation in scoring for the first time, but they also won with their defense.

“I’m really not a better coach than I was three hours ago,” Williams said, echoing something Dean Smith told Williams after the 1982 Tar Heels championship, Smith’s first.

In front of a crowd of 47,262 that was 90 percent Illinois orange at the Edward Jones Dome, the Tar Heels sprinted to a 13-point halftime lead, but Illinois stormed back and tied the game at 70 with 2 minutes, 40 seconds left.

The Tar Heels made every big play after that.

“I didn’t have to curse in the (postgame) interview tonight like I did two years ago,” Roy Williams said, laughing. His Kansas team lost to Syracuse in the final that season. In a 12-month period in which one sports curse after another seems to have been lifted — Phil Mickelson’s slump in the majors, the Boston Red Sox’s World Series jinx — Roy Williams now has his title as well. He was quick to share it, praising his family, his North Carolina and Kansas players and Tar Heels fans.

Roy Williams, 54, said he never would jump off a building if he didn’t win a national championship. But believe me, he wanted it as badly as anyone at the arena.

Rashad McCants scored 14 in the first half for North Carolina, but Roy Williams looked happiest when McCants made a leaping save of a ball and called timeout while almost landing in his coach’s lap. Roy Williams pounded McCants happily. His team played like that nearly all night. The players did what they should. Williams did everything he needed to.

And the 2004-05 Tar Heels — led by an emotional, corny, well loved coach from Asheville, N.C., — will be remembered forever.