Coach K made this Final Four about endings. Jay Wright made it clear Villanova is just getting started. | Mike Sielski

NEW ORLEANS — The day before Villanova lost to Kansas in this Final Four, someone asked Jay Wright about retirement.

It has been a popular topic here, with the story of Mike Krzyzewski’s last season approaching its denouement for months, then ending with Duke’s loss to North Carolina. Krzyzewski is 75 and coached at Duke for 42 years. Wright is 15 years younger, and his tenure at Villanova is half as long as Krzyzewski’s in Durham, and his youthful comportment makes even mentioning his retirement seem premature, even silly. Still, the question was worth asking, because Krzyzewski was in “the arena,” as he put it late Saturday night, for so long. Because he was an anomaly. Because Al McGuire retired when he was 49 and Dean Smith retired when he was 66 and John Thompson resigned when he was 57 and never walked a sideline again. Because no coach knows when he’ll wake up one morning and decide that he cannot be a coach anymore.

Could Wright imagine that?

“It’s got to be mindblowing,” he said. “I would be lying if I tell you I don’t. You think about it after each year. You think about where your life is, what are you going to do. It’s difficult to think about. And honestly, if you’re [Krzyzewski] and you’ve done it for that long, and you’ve been that successful and it’s so much a part of your life, and you think about the longer you do it the more relationships you have, and those relationships are meaningful to you … that’s probably something that’s got to be really difficult to deal with.

“I think about it because there’s going to have to be a time when it’s time for the next coach of Villanova. There’s going to have to be that time. You have to pick that time.”

» READ MORE: Collin Gillespie ended his Villanova career by giving everything, as usual. Against Kansas, it wasn’t enough. | Mike Sielski

It was a striking admission from Wright – that he does, in fact, think about when and how his career at Villanova will end. But that was Friday. Saturday brought a similar focus on endings, but a different tone and perspective from Wright. Saturday was the last game at Villanova for its two graduate-student stars and mainstays, Collin Gillespie and Jermaine Samuels. And while Wright, in the aftermath of the Wildcats’ 81-65 loss, acknowledged that Gillespie’s and Samuels’ departures made for a sad and sentimental night, there was an edge and frustration to him that was unmistakable.

Yes, Villanova didn’t have Justin Moore and was shorthanded for his absence. Yes, Kansas would have been favored anyway. But it was clear that Wright wasn’t interested in handing out any praise to his players just for trying hard. They had allowed the Jayhawks to race out to a 10-0 lead. They had too often left Ochai Agbaji open. With or without Moore, they hadn’t played well enough to win, and that fact was eating at him.

“We were ready,” he said, “and we were good enough to win that game.”

It’s funny about the Final Four, what that term, that branding, has done. It has become such a big deal for a team to reach the semifinals of the NCAA Tournament that winning a national championship can seem like icing when it’s supposed to be the cake. That dynamic isn’t necessarily true for every team; the 1991 UNLV Runnin’ Rebels and the 2015 Kentucky Wildcats, for example, were supposed to win the Tournament and are still regarded as disappointments for failing to. From the outside, though, it felt true for this Villanova team, which didn’t have the high-end talent of some of Wright’s other clubs. This one had to claw and muscle and grind its way both to a Big East Tournament championship and through the South Regional of this tournament. Maybe it just ran out of gas against Kansas. Maybe it went as far as it was meant to go.

But here’s the thing: No coach in the heat of the games that count most holds that outsider’s view, and Wright didn’t hold it for this Villanova team, either. Outside the locker room, he called the Kansas loss “the lowest of the low.” Being able to say, Hey, we reached the Final Four didn’t make the outcome easier for him to take. It made it harder for him to stomach, because the greater glory, the greatest in the sport, was so close. That the 2021-22 Wildcats may have overachieved – or perhaps performed in the main to their fullest effort and potential – gave him no consolation Saturday night.

» READ MORE: Coach K’s legacy at Duke will long outlive the defeats, and the critics who envied his greatness

“And I don’t want it to,” he said. “Part of being a competitor is really sitting in this and learning from it so it fuels you later. Tomorrow, we’ll wake up – new day, new attitude. But right now, you’ve got to live in this, and you’ve got to admit what another team did extremely well that you didn’t do. It’s OK to just sit in that, and if you sit in it, no one will just blow it off. It’s going to fuel you later.”

That doesn’t sound like a coach who’s thinking about the end of his career at all, in any context. That sounds like a coach who – two national championships, four Final Fours, and 21 years in at the program he has turned into a powerhouse – thinks he’s just getting started. And that’s reason enough to think Jay Wright and Villanova will be back here, and soon.