SAN ANTONIO -- It was the biggest college basketball game of the year, with some of the biggest stars.

It was Kansas, the birthplace of college basketball, versus Memphis -- or as UCLA coach Ben Howland repeatedly called it, "Memphis State" --a team trying to ring up its 39th victory, an NCAA single-season record.

Those were the opponents for Monday night's national championship game at the Alamodome.

Kansas 75, Memphis 68 in overtime.

Was this the final college game for freshman sensation Derrick Rose from Chicago? That was one of the big questions of the night.

Another was: "Why won't Rose shoot?" In the first half, he attempted four shots, sinking one, but he took over the game in the last eight minutes of regulation.

Did he still have an upset tummy from too many Gummy Bears, which was why he skipped Sunday's practice?

Or did the Memphis star have a case of the big-game blues, much as he seemed to in the 2007 Illinois state high school championship game. In that one, his Simeon team won pretty easily, but Rose's stats were not so hot. He put up only seven shots and missed them all.

The crowd waited for Rose to do something spectacular -- and he did late in the game, banking in an off-balance jumper as the shot clock expired to bring Memphis to the brink of a championship with a 56-49 lead.

But when he could have personally clinched the championship, Rose missed the first of two free throws. That permitted Kansas' Mario Chalmers to sink a three-point shot with 2.1 seconds left to send the game into overtime.

For points in the first half, Memphis had to reply mainly on Rose's backcourt companion, Chris Douglas-Roberts and that "George Gervin, old-man lookin' game" of his, as teammate Joey Dorsey very amusingly described it.

CDR, as many of Memphis'fans call him, accounted for nearly half of his team's points in the first half while Rose looked in need of a little CPR.

The players expected to keep up a frantic pace. Racehorse basketball, as it used to be called. No take-your-time, set-a-screen, picket-fence tactics for these guys.

"A pickup game," Dorsey likened it to before the two sides went at it.

"Get the old windpipes ready," teammate Robert Dozier advised those who were going to end up out of breath.

Kansas' star guard, Russell Robinson, summed up the Memphis version of X's and O's in a nutshell:

"They don't run many plays."

These teams did have similarities -- so many, in fact, that some portrayed this game as "a mirror image" face-off.

Oh, one more thing in common:

Neither of the head coaches had an NCAA championship trophy in his case, even though each had made quite a sterling reputation for himself in the business.

In front of one bench knelt Calipari, 49, a colorful, Jim Valvano-type who served an apprenticeship at Kansas ("I served peas and corn") before becoming a comet of the coaching profession, first at Massachusetts and later in pro ball with the New Jersey Nets.

In front of the other stood Self, 46, a square-jawed smooth talker from Okmulgee, Okla., who began his career as a Kansas graduate assistant and ended up on a checkerboard of head-coaching positions at Oral Roberts, Tulsa and Illinois.

Together they had a spectacular 2007-08 campaign, one team (Memphis) winning an all-time NCAA high 38 games, the other going 36-3.

Kansas' Sasha Kaun had been correct before the game when he said, "That's the nice thing about knowing it's the last game. There is no excuse to hold anything back."

"It's the best team that we'll play all year," Memphis' Dozier said, "and it's definitely going to be a war."

Turned out to be just that.