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110 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.16 cvs.com To that end, I thought it interesting that you namechecked Joe Paterno — another coach who ignored many calls to resign — during your New Year's Day press conference. Tere are a number of similarities between the two of you. You are not as accomplished as he was, nor as entrenched at Louisville as he was at Penn State. But you and Paterno both had long runs of success tainted by allegations. Paterno was fred in November 2011, in the wake of former assistant coach Jerry San- dusky's child abuse scandal. He died in January 2012 at 82. You spoke of the late Nittany Lions football coach with reverence. "(T)he one person I would never question who I have ever encountered in my life as a…basket- ball coach is Joe Paterno," you said on New Year's Day. "He would be the one guy that I would hold above reproach at everything. What did they do? Tey took a statue away. Tey probably killed him." Deep down, is this an outcome that you fear? W ednesday, Jan. 20, was my last chance to see you and your team up close before returning to New York. Classes were canceled for two inches of snow, but the Cardinals' 9 p.m. game against Florida State was going on as scheduled. And 21,349 people were at the YUM! Center to see it. Te game got out of hand quickly. A powerful dunk by Donovan Mitchell was the unquestioned highlight of a terrifc frst half for the Cardinals. Te lead swelled to 32, its peak, toward the end of the contest. Te game was in the bag, so with two minutes to go I took of for the press conference, certain another happy recap was in the ofng. I did not watch the fnal 1:19 of the game, during which your team gave up 10 unanswered points and saw its 29-point lead trimmed to 19 at the buzzer. While waiting for your arrival in the pressroom, I heard screaming from behind a locked door. Turned out it was you. What could you possibly be screaming about? I couldn't fgure it out until I was handed the stat sheet, which included the fnal score with the somewhat narrower margin of 84-65. "Except for the last two minutes, it was a great performance by our guys," you said postgame. You turned your attention to the frst 38 minutes for a bit, but you just couldn't stop thinking about those last two minutes. "Prior to the last two minutes we played great defense. We had them in the 30 percentile, and then we gave up layup upon layup." Incredible. Te team played 38 terrifc minutes and won by 19. But you focused disproportion- ately on those two bad minutes. Imagine if you held yourself to that level of accountability, coach. I was back in New York on Louisville basketball's D-Day, Friday, Feb. 5, 2016. Te press release arrived shortly after noon, advising that you, Ramsey and Jurich had "an important message to deliver to the university community." Te three of you, along with Chuck Smrt, who was hired by the school to investigate the allega- tions, were seated ominously in front of a black curtain. I watched on a live-stream as Ramsey shared the news that broke the city's collective heart. "After consulting with director of athletics Tom Jurich, we made the decision to withhold the men's basketball program from all conference and NCAA postseason competition following the 2015-'16 men's basketball season," Ramsey said. Afterward, many fngers pointed at many peo- ple. But Ramsey appeared to get the worst of it. A large sign suspended above Patrick O'Shea's near the YUM! Center read, "Ramsey is a coward." "Please, nobody blame Dr. Ramsey," you said on Feb. 6. "Tom Jurich made this decision, not Dr. Ramsey. Dr. Ramsey had to OK it; if Dr. Ramsey didn't want to OK it, he could have vetoed it. But Tom made the decision." Look at you up there in front of that dark curtain, coach. Why do this anymore? What's the point? You've accomplished so much. Two nation- al championships. Seven Final Fours. What's left? Some of your fnal thoughts on D-Day suggest- ed this may have crossed your mind. "Tis is a punishment I thought would never happen this season. Tis is a decision that's as harsh as anything I've seen. But I'm a soldier in this army, and I'll go along with Dr. Ramsey. And certainly there's no one in life I have more respect for than Tom Jurich. So we will go along with this, and we will play the last nine games of the season as if they're the last nine games we'll ever play the game." I think back to seven-year-old me in 1992, reading your book to my mom at my dining room table. Te kid who once idolized you hopes that you have fnally come to realize what your friend told you years ago sitting around your pool. It's really not a bad life. Sadly, the 30-year-old me knows better. Yours in basketball, Joe DePaolo The Final Act? Continued from page 57