Kelvin Sampson brought Houston basketball back from the depths. He and the Cougars can sink Villanova. | Mike Sielski

SAN ANTONIO — Kelvin Sampson has no time for your memories, your 30 for 30 documentaries about Hakeem Olajuwon and Guy Lewis and Phi Slama Jama, or the Houston Cougars of your youth. He wears his defiance like his favorite pair of broken-in pajamas. It’s comfortable to him and to his basketball team.

Houston was a lost program for a long time, and it returned to this recent and still-brief era of relative glory – a Final Four appearance last year, a matchup Saturday here against Villanova for the right to go to another national semifinal – by hiring Sampson in 2014 and letting him reconstruct the Cougars in his image. And part of that image involved facing up to reality. Houston went 34 years without winning an NCAA Tournament game. Its arena was a relic. The university and its boosters brought back one of the program’s heroes from the early 1980s, Clyde Drexler, and he lasted just two years as head coach.

Then Sampson came in – brandishing the reputation of a renegade, having won everywhere he’d been before being cast out of college basketball for violating recruiting restrictions that the NCAA has since dropped – and made it clear: That history is great. That history is a wonderful topic of wistful conversation. That history doesn’t mean a damn anymore.

“That’s all they have, is Phi Slama Jama,” he said. “They have nothing from 1984 to 2018. … When I think of Phi Slama Jama, I think of success. But as far as recruiting, you never talk about it or never mention it because it’s not relative to these kids today, but it is relative to the program. I think you should honor the past, but don’t live in it. Live in the future. Live for today.”

These present-day Cougars play just like that, like tomorrow is a fantasy. They’re 32-5, and their No. 5 seed in the West Region was never a true indication of their standing as a team that no one in this tournament wanted to face. They smothered No. 1 Arizona on Thursday night, 72-60. They give up just 59 points a game, the third-best mark in the country. They rebound like an up-for-grabs basketball is worth a month’s rent to them. They don’t long for your praise, and they don’t care about your tradition. They will build their own, thank you, and they’ll tear yours down while doing it.

“We play physical,” senior forward Fabian White Jr. said. “In practice, we barely call fouls. We dive on the floor, barely lose the ball in practice. That’s just our culture.”

That’s who they are. That’s who their coach is. Sampson is 66, one of the great notebook-fillers in the sport, and he responds to questions like a man who stopped caring what trouble his answers might cause or what eyebrows they might raise. For all the laurels he heaped on Jay Wright and the Wildcats on Friday afternoon at AT&T Arena, for instance, it was easy to detect a whiff of resentment, too. The subtext was clear: Villanova has advantages that Sampson didn’t have at Houston, so everyone ought to recognize and understand what he has done to pull this program up from the depths.

“We’ve had to overcome a lot in those first few years, whereas a school like Villanova can’t relate to that,” Sampson said. “They’ve always been Villanova. We played Villanova when I was at Oklahoma. It was Kyle Lowry and that bunch. With Villanova, the next era kept the previous era relevant because they never went down. They’ve just been so great over the years, and having a Hall of Fame coach like Jay Wright, who’s an icon in this profession himself. He’s going to get what it takes to keep that program relevant and great, whereas Houston was aching and begging for just relevancy. Villanova was always Villanova.”

The irony of Sampson’s assertions there, of course, was that he indirectly helped Villanova remain Villanova. Before the Sooners’ 85-74 loss to the Wildcats on Dec. 3, 2005, Sampson called Wright with a request to set aside one ticket at the Wachovia Center for one of his recruits, who would be attending the game. The recruit was ready to sign with Oklahoma, too, until Sampson left Norman to become Indiana’s head coach in March 2006. So since the kid got a look at Villanova’s campus during his trip to the Philadelphia area that day, he decided to come to the Main Line instead. That kid was Scottie Reynolds, who is the second-leading scorer in Villanova history and hit the shot that sent the Wildcats to the 2009 Final Four.

» READ MORE: Why is Villanova an underdog vs. Houston? NCAA history has the answer

“He’s right,” Wright said. “When you come to a place like Villanova … there are a lot of foundations set in place. There’s a culture that’s already set in place. There’s a history. There’s a pride. But there can be little interruptions sometimes. We even had it during our tenure a little bit. It seems like people always want to go back to the glory days. You could have one down year, and they want to go back to the glory days.”

The Houston Cougars had three-and-a-half decades of down years, and it took a coach with an edge to bring back a taste of those glory days, a chance to appreciate the past without holding it up as a standard that could never be reached again. Hell, Elvin Hayes is the team’s radio analyst. Olajuwon was in the stands Thursday night. But those immortals aren’t taking the floor here against the program that, for now, represents the best of college basketball. “Today, 2022: Be proud of that,” Sampson said. “Don’t live in another era. I felt like I’ve had to constantly educate that, that we are good. We have a really good basketball program.” They aim to show it here Saturday night. Villanova had better be ready.