Jerry Stackhouse, once traded by the Sixers for Aaron McKie, faced McKie, as coach of Vanderbilt

Timeout, Vanderbilt. The head coach — his own team desperate for a win, trying to close out a game at Temple — set up a play.

Did it all go according to plan? Nah, the inbounds pass bounced off the hands of the inbounds recipient. An Owls player went the other way with the ball. That play weighed heavily as the game moved into overtime.

Watching the play, Vanderbilt’s head coach never moved — keeping his arms folded as he stood. His familiar face remained stoic.

“Oh, it’s all posture,” Jerry Stackhouse said later. “I’m heated up on the inside for sure.”

Two of the more competitive human beings ever to play for the Sixers were coaching against each other Tuesday night at the Liacouras Center. Stackhouse and Temple head coach Aaron McKie were never teammates. In fact, they were traded for each other, almost a quarter century ago.

That’s a big moment in Sixers’ history right there. Stackhouse had been the guy the Sixers were going to build around, drafted third in 1995, just ahead of Stackhouse’s North Carolina teammate Rasheed Wallace and a high school player named Kevin Garnett.

Days after Stackhouse was drafted, The Inquirer sent a reporter (who happened to be me) to Kinston, N.C., to the Foster Chapel Baptist Church, where churchgoers attended services on the second and fourth Sundays of every month down a chalky dirt road just off the state’s Highway 58.

“It’s a little country church by the side of the road where everybody is somebody,” said the church’s pastor, Minnie Stackhouse, mother of Jerry.

Jerry was being called the savior of the franchise, I had noted in the story. Life just turns in interesting directions. A year later, the Sixers had the No. 1 pick in the draft and chose a new savior named Iverson, who wasn’t such a perfect fit with Stackhouse, hence that trade a year after that:

Stackhouse and Eric Montross and a draft pick to Detroit for McKie, Theo Ratliff, and a pick.

The Allen Iverson era took off from there, including that trip to the 2001 NBA Finals.

A lot of ships passed in a lot of nights before these two men landed in the Liacouras Center on a cold, rainy Tuesday. Four nights earlier, Temple had knocked off Villanova.

A win in this matchup could underscore the importance of that.

The point of all this? This coaching stuff is a high wire even for players who were ferocious in their own time. Margins between success and failure remain so thin. A 38-point performance by an Owls guard, Damian Dunn, who happens to be from Kinston, N.C., himself … not enough, Dunn driving for a foul late in OT. There was contact … no foul call. Final score: Vanderbilt 89, Temple 87.

“We’ve got to defend better,” said McKie, who is as honest in his assessments as any basketball coach you’re going to find, saying about his defense needing improvement “across the board.”

“This was a desperate team coming in. It seemed like they wanted it more. ... We didn’t do a good job of taking their strengths away.”

Both coaches looked at the stat sheet and focused on Vanderbilt scoring 48 of its points in the paint. That had been a point of emphasis, Stackhouse said. Defensive communication — “It wasn’t good enough,” McKie said. “It cost us. It really cost us.”

While McKie had been a Sixers assistant before assisting Fran Dunphy at Temple, Stackhouse had been a G League head coach before taking the Vandy job. It’s easy to wander back to their playing days, but it has been so long.

To ask McKie if he saw any Larry Brown influences in Stackhouse’s coaching?

“Eh, I saw him running a play that Coach Brown used to run,” McKie said.

Heck, even Brown’s teams at his recent stops looked different than those Sixers days.

“We laugh about it all the time,” McKie said of conversations with his Owls coaching staff. “The play is so different. It’s still basketball, but it’s played a little bit differently than when Stack and I played the game.”

Courtside, Stackhouse finished up talking to Vandy’s radio crew.

After all these years, is there anything meaningful in coming to Philadelphia?

“Yeah, yeah, it still feels good,” Stackhouse said. “I went down and hit some old stops. I went down to Ishkabibble’s and got myself a cheesesteak. I went to the Jamaican Jerk Hut — they moved a little bit. The city’s changed a whole lot. But it’s still good to see. I probably had about 10 to 12 tickets today, old friends still here in the city.”

When it comes to coaching? Stackhouse said this hits for him.

“It’s the only thing that gives me the same competitive fire that I felt on the floor,” Stackhouse said. “I’m not able to get out there, but I’m able to try to orchestrate it, motivate, and put guys in a position to do what I loved to do for a very long time.”

Who was less likely to be a future coach back in the day, Stackhouse or McKie?

“Oh, I don’t know — we learned from one of the best,” Stackhouse said. “He learned from Larry Brown. I still talk to Larry Brown. I talked to him last week. We were struggling with rebounding the ball. He gave me a little drill. That’s what’s good about having that good North Carolina connection, but Aaron, same thing — we were able to learn from great coaches and share it back with the guys we have now.”

This was a real basketball game, he said, like what Vanderbilt will see in the Southeastern Conference. And November games count. One team was going to leave the Liacouras Center miserable, even if the difference was a play or two. Such familiar coaches on the sideline weren’t going to change that.

Even fans couldn’t help noting the matchup. Just before the second half began, a Temple season-ticket holder said, “The halftime show I wanted to see was Stackhouse vs. McKie, one-on-one.”