NCAA Tournament Championship Game | Purdue's when not if story

The scene is chaos. Gold and black flutters, confetti sliding underneath feet, and the Purdue band is playing so loud that Matt Painter has to lean into the media members that have made their way to him.

There's a rope and it wraps around, following the curve of the three-point line, held up by security personnel. Painter is on one side of the line, but he leans over to hear the question.

He straightens up. Painter is always surprisingly tall. It's been so long now, that you sometimes forget he did this as a player, too.

Well not this, no one at Purdue on either side of the rope had done this for forty four years. The Final Four.

"Notes, Yeah," Painter says at his full height as his players start to cut down the nets that unlock the secret portal to the Final Four in Phoenix. "Six pages."

A year ago, Matt Painter was writing, for six pages he wrote down his feelings towards - well, who are we to know? But it was how Painter first tried to process Purdue's upset at the hands of Fairleigh Dickinson.

A loss that Matt Painter to this day doesn't like to talk about. Not because of the hurt, even though it exists, or because he's moved on. It's impossible, really. But because there's no way to talk about a #16 upset of a #1 seed without sounding disrespectful.

It was never supposed to happen, but Painter's clear. That team, Fairleigh Dickinson, on that day, was better, and they beat Purdue.

So he wrote and wrote and road on a bus that went to an airport and a plane that returned them all to West Lafayette where a long off-season began.

I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: this season could have turned to ash so easily.

"When people like, knock you and say stuff about you," Painter says in that same moment, in Detroit, cathartic debris being stuffed into pockets and hats to remember later. "You don't like living with yourself at times. And that's terrible. It's just a damn game. It's how you feel, it's really how you feel."

Painter is a truth-teller. His truth has been pain for the last year. There's been so much winning since Painter took over Purdue in 2005. But the scale is broken. It's values are corrupt.

"I like to just move on," Painter said during this NCAA Tournament run. "I enjoy winning, but not as much as I hate to lose and the way that makes you feel. You guys have no idea the way it makes you feel when you lose a game and the guilt and the burden you carry because you feel like you let people down. Here you are, 53 years old, and you feel the same way when you lose a little league game. It doesn't change."

And that weight lets itself go in tiny moments that night. His former player, on the other side of two major knee injuries, a once promising NBA career cut short, but still thriving, Robbie Hummel congratulates his coach and his coach says he did it for him and all his players that deserved these wins before and never got them. Hummel as professional a broadcaster as there is, and he breaks.

Painter is a self-proclaimed not emotional guy. There's tears that day.

For a moment, maybe the winning does seem sweet enough to counteract the losses.

"The fact they want to do it for you like you want to do it for them, right?" Painter said, talking about his players. His players, current, and former, and future, it doesn't seem to differentiate. When the final buzzer goes, Purdue past met with Purdue present, and the joy did not seem less, but more, because they have all wanted this for so long.

We are sports and sports is cliche, and also sometimes truth. Those are usually the beautiful moments.

When the years fade and the name on the front of the jersey is really all that identifies them.

Matt Painter is 53 years old. He has handed the reigns of his defensive and scouting over to Paul Lusk and Terry Johnson. Both of them have had experience all over college basketball. They've had their own teams and own moments, Johnson coming here from Ohio State and Lusk returning to Purdue for his second stint as an assistant coach after having his own team.

But Painter has also handed over the offense.

Painter wants to be able to be locked into the game, the rotations, his players. He doesn't want all the voices.

PJ Thompson is 28 years old. Sasha Stefanovic is 23 years old. Together, they're as old as Matt Painter.

They have the keys to the sometimes second, sometimes third, at times first, most efficient offense in the country. A year ago, Stefanovic was still a professional basketball player.

Sometimes Matt Painter is a dirty liar. He tells us he tells his players, don't be coaches. It's miserable. He laughs then when talking about Johnny Hill at Utah State now, coaching, who Purdue faced in the round of 32.

It's a joke. It's a joke that Painter means.

"It's different because as a Coach I haven't dealt with losing in the tournament," Stefanovic tells me about that warning Painter gives. It's true. Stefanovic was picked to take one of the two added coaching spots the NCAA has allowed college programs this season. He's been tasked with the in bounds offense.

He hasn't lost an NCAA Tournament as a coach.

But he understands the impossibility of his career before him.

Stefanovic was on the floor for North Texas, St. Peter's, and Virginia. He was as far and as close as you could get to this moment as a player.

"It's hard to explain because you want to be able to make a difference," Stefanovic said. "And do something and you feel like you can do that as a player, but as a coach it's not always there."

Stefanovic didn't really have any idea what he was doing at first. He knew what worked for him as a player when it came to calling plays, and he leaned on that in Purdue's early exhibition game at Arkansas. But it took paying attention, hard work, listening, and learning from Matt Painter and PJ Thompson to really get it. The transformation from the beginning of the season to now, is part of how Purdue is thriving at the end of the season.

It's worked. Purdue's offense has been mostly unstoppable.

"We're a top three offense in the country," Stefanovic said. "And it's a 28 year old leading it, and a 25 year old running the out of bounds."

"He is gonna be one of the great basketball minds," Stefanovic said. "I don't know how soon it's gonna be, but it's gonna be eventually. He's gonna be one of the best college coaches in the country. His ability to explain things to players from a player's perspective but also how a coach would explain. What we're trying to do. What we're trying to exploit."

The worst kept secret at Purdue is PJ Thompson is the next great Purdue basketball coach. Maybe it happens at Purdue or somewhere else, that's a future too hard to predict, but everyone's certain that Thompson will be a Head Coach before it's all said and done.

The question is when, not if, with Thomopson.

It's in his blood. Thompson's father is a head coach, who he's still always in his son's ear about he saw on the court. Thompson isn't even 30 and he tells me after an early round victory that he's already been involved in 14 NCAA Tournament games. That number keeps going up.

By the time he's thirty, he might just have more NCAA games coached and played than years on this earth.

"If I want to enter the coaching world, you have to start over," Stefanovic told me about choosing to not just come to Purdue to coach, but to give up playing professional. It wasn't a certain for Stefanovic. He didn't always dream of being a coach.

But the opportunity was too good to pass up, but was he willing to give up being a player so young?

It mirrors Thompson's own struggles with the question of when to hang up the jersey when he felt like he could still be playing. Unlike Stefanovic though, it wasn't a question of if he wanted to be a coach. Thompson always knew he would be one, just didn't know the when.

"We have a special relationship," Thompson said about Braden Smith after Smith struggled in Purdue's Final Four matchup with NC State. Smith had 5 first half turnovers and an uncharacteristic shooting performance that saw him make just one shot. "I told him before he played a college game, there's no other point guard I'd rather have run the show."

I'm reminded of something Thompson told me earlier in the tournament run when talking about true freshman Myles Colvin making his way back into the rotation this late in the season.

"In basketball, people try to label you, and it's your job to not allow them to do so."

I'm also thinking of PJ Thompson after Purdue's lost to Ohio State. It was perhaps the worst offensive performance of the season. Thompson has a similar tone talking about the NC State game where Purdue's defense carried the load to advance the Boilermakers to a National Title game on Monday.

"It's my job to put our team in the best position possible to create an advantage," Thompson said. "I've got to do a better job to generate open shots for our group."

PJ Thompson is such a well known name at Purdue that sometimes the youth evades you. Same, with Purdue's roster. While Zach Edey and Mason Gillis are seniors, Purdue is still starting two true sophomores. Two of its key bench cogs are freshman.

Purdue's headlines have been bold for a while, but it's never been here. For the longest time, people told Purdue what it was. Purdue didn't listen.

"I'll do a better job putting these guys in better situations where we have an advantage and I think they'll make better decisions," Thompson said. "I didn't think our decision making was great, but it's our first time playing in the Final Four. Lot of emotions involved. I'm excited. We'll have two teams left playing on Monday."

At the time of telling me this, the UConn and Alabama game was just starting. The stage is now set. Purdue and UConn will play for the National Title, the two best teams all season getting to settle it in a winner take all match up of Titans.

But between all the spinning pieces of players and coaches, Purdue is kept in orbit by the gravity of Matt Painter. A respect and admiration that latches today's players to the ones that played for Gene Keady forty years ago.

"I think when it's all said and done, Paint's gonna get the due credit he deserves," Thompson told me a couple weeks ago. "I wish he got the national attention, the props, and congratulations that he deserves. But I think if he keeps doing things how he's doing, and he keeps winning how he's winning. I think it'll all take care of itself, and when it's all said and done, they'll call him one of the best coaches to ever coach in college basketball."

There was a touch of prophet to Thompson when he told me this before Purdue swept Detroit and advanced to the Final Four, and eventually the National Title game. Painter is now having the March success that his basketball genius has foreshadowed. The headlines have turned towards what Thompson and Purdue has always known.

Matt Painter is one of the best coaches in the history of college basketball.

But Painter's success didn't start with Painter. It started with Gene Keady who laid down the tracks to ensure that Painter could start off full steam ahead.

And now the tracks are laid for Thompson, whenever that train arrives.

It's when, not if with Thompson, still.

And when Thompson does end up with that whistle, don't expect him to be alone.

There's a certain Boilermaker point guard that's already called dibs on being the next Purdue coach in waiting.

"I told him where he goes, whenever I'm done playing, give me a call," Braden Smith said after Purdue's Final Four win against NC State. "Because I'll be right there with him. He said he would. He said I'd be his first call."

But before that future, Purdue has this present.

Purdue has a National title to win.