CHAPEL HILL - UNC's new student body president has a crazy notion: students should celebrate big basketball victories safely.

Jasmin Jones' initiative is called Safe Celebration. The idea is this: when UNC beats Duke or wins a national championship, the subsequent Franklin Street bonanza could be safer if it was just a bit more structured.

"This is gonna be hard," Jones said. "It needs the traditional sense to it, but needs to change from a destructive thing to a positive thing."

In case you're new to town, here's how it works: Carolina beats Duke or, even better, wins the NCAA championship. (Let's not even talk about Carolina beating Duke in the national championship game.)

The final buzzer sounds. Students pour out dorms, restaurants and bars and sprint to Franklin Street. Voices fight to be heard over a maddening din. And swiftly, much of the center of town is awash in delirious blue-and-white-clad students, alums and Tar Heel fans looking for a party. Fires are set and leapt over, crowds are surfed.

Get the idea?

When Carolina beat Michigan State for the national title in March, the crowd that filled Franklin Street was estimated at 30,000 -- less than anticipated thanks to cold weather. Trees and several traffic signals were damaged. There were two arrests. Ten people were taken to UNC Hospitals, and 16 more had injuries treated at the scene.

The next day, a Chapel Hill police spokesman said that, given the size of the crowd, "things weren't too bad."

Jones, the student leader, doesn't want things to get worse. She's convinced that students engage in dangerous activities -- like jumping through fire -- for lack of anything better. So she's thinking of simple solutions, like perhaps putting a bunch of beach balls around for people to knock around.

"You're out there but there's nothing exciting going on, so we start a fire or body surf," she said, adding that she's not trying to throw a wet blanket over the frivolity. "We're making steps before something worse happens."

Emily Banks, a rising UNC sophomore from New York City, said she felt safe during the April celebration on Franklin Street but acknowledges dangers arise when you mix fire, alcohol and big crowds. She wonders whether student government really can tame such a large group.

"It would be difficult to stop them because there are so many people there; it's a big mob," Banks said. "It would be a tough balance between not making people angry and making sure people are safe."

Andrew Coonin, who heads the Carolina Athletic Association, a student group that doles out basketball tickets, said he saw promising examples during the spring celebration.

"A person brought a boom box and the people around him were line-dancing to a popular song," he wrote in an e-mail to the Chapel Hill News. "If we can offer students safe, and fun ways to express themselves, then we expect that many students and participants in the revelry will take part in those activities."

Jones wants a public service component to this new way of celebrating as well. She's fuzzy so far on these details, but perhaps a contingent of students, after a few hours of sleep, return to help with the cleanup, slap some fresh paint on walls, and spruce up the town center they just spent a few hours abusing.

For town leaders, who are Tar Heel fans too, these raucous celebrations are a happy problem. For the national championship game, local police forces sent 320 officers to the scene that night along with 76 firefighters and EMS workers and 75 traffic monitors.

It's not cheap. The total cost of cleanup -- stretching from the Saturday night national semifinal games through the Monday night final -- was $207,825, which the town and university split evenly.

Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy thinks Jones' plan can work. He points to the improvements made to the annual Franklin Street Halloween celebration. Town leaders clamped down last year, imposing traffic and alcohol restrictions, and emerged pleased with a smaller event with fewer arrests or other problems.

"Halloween last year was a real lesson that you can take something on the wrong trajectory and turn it around," Foy said.

But the key, he added, is that Safe Celebration is that students buy into it.

"It's not coming from the UNC administration and it's not coming from the town," he said. "It does have to be a student-led thing. I'm optimistic about this."

Brian Curran, Chapel Hill's police chief, said he'd welcome any initiative that might reduce the number of bonfires and drunk students. Long after the fires burn out and most police officers go home, emergency services workers are still treating students who had far too much to drink, Curran said.

"After the crowd is gone, if you walk back through Polk Place, it's just a battlefield," he said. "Just kids too drunk to move."