Newton, Kentucky’s new athletic director, visited Pitino in 1989 at his home in Bedford, N.Y., to lay out what the first two years would look like if Pitino quit the Knicks to help resurrect a defamed college basketball program that had narrowly avoided the N.C.A.A.’s so-called death penalty for major recruiting violations and academic fraud.  “C. M. said, ‘We’ve been hit really hard,’ ” Pitino said. “No TV, no postseason tournaments, no players. We had eight kids — and they basically were the guys who didn’t play, who grew up in Kentucky and always dreamed of playing there.”  Stars or not, what do you tell those who awoke to a scorched earth and must pay for the sins of the departed? How do you keep emotional and impressionable young men in your tattered tent when they are free to flee and experts are already assuring them their team will be enshrouded in competitive darkness?  You begin, perhaps, by trying to convince them that a community’s restoration of principles and pride might actually be worth more in the grand scheme of things than the pursuit of a trophy. Or, as in the current case of Penn State, a hypothetical trip to the Taxslayer.com Gator Bowl.  “We did lose a couple of players, but the guys that stayed, we told them, ‘You’re going to be able to really do something really different here,’ ” Pitino said from his current perch in Louisville. “ ‘Every night you play, you’re going to be in what feels like a tournament game.’ And that I think is what Bill O’Brien can tell his players: every game is going to be your bowl game.”  Whether Penn State should be playing football next season on television, or at all, is another debatable matter but not the reality for O’Brien and his players any more than the guilty-as-charged evil of Jerry Sandusky and the alleged negligence of Paterno are their responsibility.  “You feel sorry for yourself and you say: Why are we being punished?” said Deron Feldhaus, one of the players who carried on with Pitino. “But my dad had played at Kentucky. I had also been redshirted my freshman year so I would have had to sit out a year had we transferred. And I also knew that by my senior year we would have a chance to play in the tournament again, so all of us in that class put a lot on that.”  O’Brien could be cutting and pasting to field a team next season but will no doubt be pitching a similar plan by next year to potential recruits: redshirt a year, help lead us back to bowl prominence by the time you’re a junior. The forecasts of a decade or more of football misery at Penn State may be overstating the case in a college sports culture that is primarily defined by continuous change.  With the understanding that basketball requires fewer players to form a competitive team, Pitino did not experience so much as a losing season at Kentucky, going 14-14 in 1989-90 with a core of the aforementioned in-state players — Feldhaus, Richie Farmer and John Pelphrey — and Sean Woods, a point guard from Indianapolis.  But more than the ability of that team to tread water, Feldhaus recalled the sense of appreciation and relief over the mere opportunity to carry on.  “The games weren’t on TV that first year, so everyone wanted to come out,” he said in a telephone interview. “And the crowds, I don’t know, they just seemed louder that season than they’d ever been.”  Without touching on transgressions, Pitino noted the emotional similarities to his and O’Brien’s first-year circumstances, if only because Kentucky basketball is every bit the state passion that Penn State football has been to a large part of Pennsylvania.  “I remember the Sports Illustrated cover with a kid in uniform with his back to the reader and the headline, ‘Kentucky’s Shame,’ ” Pitino said. “That was pretty much how everyone there felt, kind of humiliated.”  Do students and alumni fuel the bonfires of impropriety with their unbridled passion? Are sports too ingrained in the university psyche? We can argue all that and lecture the masses on how we are long overdue on scaling it all back.  But let’s be honest: running parallel to the coverage of the Penn State nightmare has been the collective news media crusade for a football tournament that would only bring more television money into the pool, escalate the arms race in the hysterical quest to be No. 1 and further empower the coaches who wind up in control of the institutional hedge fund of ethics.  During Pitino’s long career, his celebrity fortunes have soared to the top and on one occasion scraped the bottom, but when asked to rank his most gratifying experiences, he cited two that were inextricably tied to personal feelings and overachievement: his upstart Providence team reaching the 1987 Final Four soon after the death of a young son and his first Kentucky teams that pushed up from where there was no place else to go.  In his second season at Kentucky, upgraded with a new recruiting class, Pitino coached a team that went 22-6 but still could not play in the N.C.A.A. tournament. In Year 3, Kentucky made the East Regional final, losing to Duke on Christian Laettner’s buzzer beater in one of sport’s most memorable games.  More than that, Pitino said he relished the ceremonial satisfaction of watching the jerseys of that team’s four seniors — Feldhaus, Pelphrey, Farmer and Woods — soon after raised to the rafters at Rupp Arena.  “When I first got to Kentucky I was an outsider, and I didn’t understand how deep the wounds were and what it meant to those people,” he said. “I had tears in my eyes watching those jerseys go up there, and I think that’s when I finally got it.”  Those seniors — known in Kentucky as the Unforgettables — helped peeled away for a short time the layers of ostentation that have bloated big-time college sports. At Penn State, there is no choice but to get smaller and think smaller. Given the somewhat grotesque feeding frenzy the N.C.A.A. has sanctioned, players have every right to leave to play for a national title or simply on a team not staggered by scandal.  There are no guarantees anywhere, but those who stay may discover there are rewards to downscaling they never would have imagined.
As Rick Pitino, now Louisvilleâs coach, once had to tell basketball players at Kentucky, signing on to restore a communityâs principles and pride can be worth more than any trophy.