It’s been 18 years — longer than just about anyone who will enroll at WVU in the fall has been alive — since Bob Huggins coached in the Final Four. He likes to say he doesn’t remember a lot about what happened, apart from not making shots and missing free throws, but it was the preamble that did stick out a little bit before he readied to return to his game’s greatest stage.

The Mountaineers had a private practice Tuesday and again Wednesday before leaving Morgantown, but it wasn’t always that way with Huggins. The practices before Cincinnati’s Final Four were open and very popular.

“I didn’t want them to get uptight and I was afraid if I started to pull back things, they’d get upright,” he said. “We ended up with like 12,000 people in there. It’s hard to practice with 12,000 people in there. That wasn’t very smart on my part. I think you have to do some things and me trying to keep things normal, I probably made things very abnormal.”

(Highlight of the visit thus far: An assistant at a school with a name you might, but probably won’t recognize was eating at a chain restaurant and glowing about how “we don’t have anything like this” where he’s from and the meal was “delicious.” He ate an enormous salad, grinded almost an entire canister of pepper over a big steak and gobbled up a slice of cheesecake all while enjoying a dark 22 ounce draft. Now that’s not unusual, even though it was at midnight, but he was feeling it and I was worried he was going to lose what he was feeling. He then ordered another smaller beer. He stood at some point for some reason and then sat down and totally missed the chair. I checked the newspaper this morning and, fortunately, his night went on without incident.)