Such glorious days these are for the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. The basketball team is in the Final Four, a championship so close as to put the campus into a state of vibration. And Roy Williams, their down-home coach, finds himself celebrated for hill-country wit and hoops acumen.

Rival coaches bow as his acolytes.

“When it all shakes out,” Gonzaga Coach Mark Few said, “he’ll be one of the Mount Rushmore types in college coaching.”

I’d genuflect myself, if only I could administer a mind wipe.

Amid the blue-and-white pompoms, few are so rude as to mention that the University of North Carolina, the Microsoft of college basketball, remains enmeshed in a scandal of spectacular proportions. Put simply, for two decades until 2013, the university provided fake classes for many hundreds of student athletes, most of them basketball and football players.

Coach Williams’s longtime man Friday, Wayne Walden, a former academic counselor, played switchman, steering basketball players to these classes. A touch of plagiarism, a no-show, were O.K. if it gave the young man more time to work on his drop step. There was one goal: Keep those grade-point averages at the minimum needed to compete for the university.