The Weekly Word is GoldandBlack.com's weekly, obviously, column covering Purdue football, basketball and recruiting, as well as college sports issues, the true meaning of life, or whatever other topics might come to mind in a given week.

Purdue should be good next season, top-25, Big Ten-contender good, if you ask me.

But if there's anything this season illustrated before it being cut short, it's that nothing is guaranteed, no matter how many games you've won, how many titles you've claimed, how close you might have just come to the Final Four.

Talent wasn't Purdue's problem this season. No, the Boilermakers weren't the most gifted or most complete team in college basketball, but they were too close to too much for things to be as simple as the players not being good enough or something like that.

Now, it's time for those deeper-rooted elements to fall into place, starting during this moratorium on everything.

To put this plainly, Purdue just needs to grow up, in basketball terms, that is.

It needs to mature — to benefit from experience, grow more comfortable with each other and in certain situations, to grow into aggressiveness, to develop improved leadership and to compete at a level it didn't every time out this season. Purdue has good people, top to bottom, on its basketball team. Can teams be too nice sometimes? Sure they can.

That's the biggest piece of this whole puzzle, for Purdue to find the consistency it needs next season to thrive where it just fell short.

This will be an upperclassman-heavy, experienced team next season and the Boilermakers will need to play like it to be as good as they should be. This was not necessarily an inexperienced team this season yet it often looked just that, and that's why it wasn't as good as it could have been.

Purdue has a golden opportunity ahead of It next season, a chance to sneak up on people again. I'm not sure there's a team in the Big Ten with a higher ceiling to improve from one season to the next. Its newcomers will make a considerable impact, yet its fate will be determined by those returning, and just how much value and how many lessons came from this past season of wild variance.

People, for whatever reason, often ask me what part of this job I enjoy most, as if driving to and from Iowa City in February weather every year isn't the obvious answer.

I've always told them that the people are my favorite part of the job, the people you meet, the connections you make and the relationships that come from them.

Kent Sheets was my favorite part of the job.

Kent — Kent from Ann Arbor, as many of you know him from our message boards — died earlier this week. Complications from heart surgery.

I couldn't remember how I even came to know Kent until just now, when a search of my e-mail box yielded hundreds of returns, the first of which read, "Nice to meet you in Harrisburg."

Now I remember.

It was 2005 — yes, I should clear out my e-mail box every 30 years or so — and a co-worker and I were traveling back from Penn State after Purdue had played there the day before. Kent saw us in the airport and introduced himself.

Many years, scores of e-mails and hundreds of text message exchanges later came a bit of a tradition.

Each time Purdue played basketball at Michigan, he and I would meet at Zingerman's before the game, to talk about sports, life, respective health issues, deli meats and whatever else over $20 sandwiches. Kent was interesting and interested. He was funny, wise, happy and appreciative. And he knew everyone, had a connection everywhere.

When I joked in a post-game video that a school called Siena Heights — Purdue opponent Central Michigan had played them — sounded more like a prime-time soap opera on FOX, reaction was swift: "You hurt me with the cheap shot at Siena Heights," Kent texted. "My first job out of Purdue was there. ... But it was a funny cheap shot I do admit. I was PA announcer for many home Siena Heights games. A friend just retired as their AD. He will love your cheap shot. Happy New Year."

Kent had stories and connections, but man, as much as he liked to talk, what I loved about the man was that he listened. And to listen is to care.

The other night, I spent a good hour rifling through all these texts from him and laughing out loud a few times at some of his excited real-time updates for me from Michigan games — he went to all of them — or whatever Big Ten game he might be watching.

Him: Who the hell is Curtis Jones? 17 points. All this half. At the line for 18 now. He's killing UM.

Me: The kid who started off at Indiana.

Him: Oh!!!!

Or ...

Him: You have covered ugly games. It's 18-12 UM over OSU. Ugly!!!

Me: Wait 'til Purdue-IU this weekend if Devonte Green is bad.

Him: UM shooting like they're on the road ... Can't end half fast enough. Hope Red Panda is in locker room.

Him: My wish is granted. RED PANDA!!!!

Him: Once again, no turnovers for Red Panda. Can't say the same for these teams.

He was enthusiastic, shall we say, about all things, not just basketball or Purdue or Michigan.

The common thread among these many, many exchanges: They almost all started with "Glad you got back from ..." or ended with "Safe travels to ..." or something of the sort. There are things I'm anxious about related to basketball-season travel and I honestly believe that every time Kent watched Purdue play, he thought of me getting where I needed to be and back OK.

People were important to him.

Few months back, Purdue played at Michigan, a 7 p.m. tip. I was late getting into town. Had some stops to make and a football commitment to deal with on the way up. Kent was hosting a program for Michigan's School of Family Medicine. We were supposed to meet at 4. That wasn't going to work for either of us. Zingerman's has two locations, one of which would have been far more convenient for him, but when he asked what my wife had asked me to bring back this year, he directed me to the other location, the one that would require a bout with rush-hour Downtown Ann Arbor traffic.

He walked in 15 minutes before I had to walk out, didn't even eat.

He made special effort just to sit there and watch me down a reuben like a Conehead — that's a reference he'd have loved, by the way — and listen to me talk with my mouth full for a while.

In that time, TJ Storment gave Purdue a football commitment, the commitment he backed out of soon thereafter.

"So much for knowing where I was when Storment committed," Kent texted the next day.

I'm gonna miss those text messages so much.

Just wish he could have replied to my last one.

There's a lot of to discuss this week ...

• Right now, America is in financial crisis, among other forms of crisis, and while college athletic departments should be the least of the nation's concerns at this time, they can be exposed here in a big way.

In the short term, the NCAA Tournament revenue shortfall, as reported yesterday by USA Today, seems extremely problematic. How those losses weigh against the unintended gains from canceled expenditures saved, we don't know. But the chances of that being a profitable trade-off are likely remote.

In the long term — and this must be a secondary concern right now — that stadium project has to be considered jeopardized as the country faces the prospect of a recession. Privately funding stadium projects may be off the table, not just at Purdue, but everywhere. Again, and as with everything else right now, we'll see.

I think time will tell on the fallout at Purdue, and we'll get reaction as reaction comes in, but it stands to reason to suggest that this could be a very, very damaging thing.

Purdue has been very aggressive in its attempts to reinvigorate football and raise its athletic department overall to a higher level competitively. Significant facility projects have been undertaken, staff has grown considerably and coaches' salaries have risen sharply. Reserves from the prior administration have been dipped into, and incurring additional debt may not be an option.

Life will return to normal, eventually, we can only assume.

But there are inevitably hard days ahead.

• The last time I had to check myself into an ER — a blood vessel in my ear burst, and so the side of my head blew up like a watermelon under Gallagher's mallet (good times) — there was quite a scene.

While I was checking in, a man about my age with a certain look about him, shall we say, came tearing out from between the double doors into the waiting area, screaming bloody murder, a woman following him trying to corral him. He was clearly outside of himself due to some sort of chemical. Must have drank too much coffee that morning or something.

A nurse followed the two of them and was subjected to verbal abuse no person should ever endure as our man here, um, opted out of the IVs that were already stuck up his arm, dragging equipment behind him into the common area. I'd imagine that equipment wasn't cheap. The woman at the check-in desk called for security with a sort of casualness that suggested this incident was no first of its kind.

Security got things under control by any means necessary, except for the verbal abuse directed at that nurse, the very nurse who then had to take the man back behind those doors to care for him.

Right now, thousands of nurses in thousands of hospitals are preparing for the worst, for those very double doors to burst open with a flood of coronavirus-infected folks. At this scale, or any scale for that matter, this is unprecedented and these men and women be our first responders. They may or may not have enough of what they need, or any of what they need in some cases. Many of them will have vulnerable people at home, raising the personal stakes of infection to torturous levels.

Keep them in mind these next few weeks. There are professions in this country and this world — teachers, cops, nurses, to name a few — that are grossly under-appreciated, where people put up with too much crap, work too hard, often for too little, take too much home with them, and don't get enough thanks for the vital, essential and profoundly important work they do.

That really hit home for me watching that coffee drinker direct every hateful, misogynistic word he could think of — perhaps inventing a few new ones along the way — at the person who may very well have had his life in her hands.

Now, this week, with all that's going on, it's worth remembering.

Thank you, nurses.

• Now's the time in recruiting for relationships to matter most, and for those who've done their work early to be rewarded, because if this pause button stays pressed for a while, visits and off-campus recruiting are done for quite some time.

Knowing Purdue basketball's penchant for building early foundations and strong relationships and football's knack for creativity, this is one element of this whole ordeal where I'm not so sure Purdue can't actually benefit.

• This is normally the space where I would have revisited our preseason basketball predictions, for the purpose of accountability. We'll do that elsewhere, at some other time. Needless to say, it was not a banner year for predictions.

Anyway, if you were looking forward to this year's self-flagellation over preseason prognostication gone sideways, you'll have your day.

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