UCLA's Kevin Love: Fact & fiction

An enviable dilemma faced North Carolina and UCLA fans Saturday night. UCLA was the first to swagger its way into the Final Four by crushing Xavier 76-57 and win the West regional final. A few hours later, my Tar Heels followed suit, pulling out a hard-fought win over Louisville to take the East region, 83-73. Teams from two of basketball's most storied programs, along with their legions of adoring fans, were on their way to San Antonio. My husband -- a Texas Christian graduate who married into a family of crazy Tar Heel fans and surrendered -- and I intended to be two of them.

But first: how to get a ticket? The best option is usually to hold off until close to tip-off of the first game of the Saturday semifinals, when scalpers are getting desperate to offload their cache. Better yet, if your team isn't playing the first game, you can wait until the game is underway to haggle. By that time, conventional wisdom goes, a ticket's value should be dropping faster than a Tyler Hansbrough jump shot.

And yet, Saturday night, that strategy didn't look foolproof. You see, two more games were still to be played Sunday, leaving two more slots to be filled to establish the Final Four. And one of those games was between No. 2-seeded Texas and top-seeded Memphis the next day in Houston, a pseudo home-court advantage for the Longhorns. San Antonio, site of this weekend's Final Four, is even closer to Texas' Austin campus.

Thus, the conundrum: a) pay appalling prices to a Web site ticket broker to ensure we have a ticket in hand in case the Longhorns should win and the entire population of Texas gets in their gas-guzzling SUVs and heads for the Alamodome, or b) pray that Memphis wins so we have a better chance of buying a ticket on the street at a price that doesn't cause us to skip the mortgage this month.

Here's where history comes in. My husband and I followed North Carolina when the Tar Heels won the national championship in St. Louis in 2005. Some friends who were Kansas fans sold us their Final Four tickets -- at face value -- after the Jayhawks got Bucknelled in the first round. These friends, practiced in the art of Final Four ticket hunting, warned us that these were terrible seats. (Indeed, they later proved to be. The court looked like a matchbox.) But that's fine, they counseled. They told us to use the tickets as a pass into the arena and suffer through the first semifinal game. Then, when the game was over, haggle for better seats from the disappointed fans of the team that had just lost.

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