NEW ORLEANS — Not all Final Four games are created equal.

Despite the enormous popularity of college basketball’s season closer, there are some years when one of the national semifinal games draws a lot more attention than the other.

This year is a pretty good example.

Saturday’s first game, the intra-commonwealth matchup of Kentucky and Louisville, has drawn the bulk of the attention in the buildup to the fifth Final Four played in New Orleans. It’s not just that the fans of the schools don’t get along or agree on basic color schemes or that John Calipari of Kentucky and Rick Pitino of Louisville are two of the sport’s more recognizable and thus more written about coaches.

It’s all of that and more.

Sorry, Ohio State and Kansas, but that’s the way it is. The great thing is the winners of both the marquee game and the other game meet for the championship.

Thankfully, not everybody is thinking the way the majority of fans are.

“I haven’t noticed too much,” Ohio State guard Aaron Craft said Friday when asked about the Kentucky-Louisville rivalry. “All four teams here are great. I think as a basketball team we’ve done a good job of focusing on our game and focusing on Kansas because, you know, they’re a great basketball team. If we overlook them, we have all the outside distractions going on, we’re going to go home. I think we’ve done a great job of just focusing in on what we need to focus on and not letting too many outside things get inside of our circle.”

Quite a few teams have done just that and overcome being the other game.

No Final Four was more dominated by one semifinal over the other than in 1983.

Houston, known then as Phi Slamma Jamma, featured Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler on a roster of players who spent most of their time above the rim while crowds oohed and aahed.

Louisville had an incredible group of high-flying athletes as well with the McCray brothers, Milt Wagner and Billy Thompson. The VCRs were set for that game.

Georgia and North Carolina State was just going to be two hours to talk about how great the other game was.