09:51 AM EST on Tuesday, December 6, 2005

PROVIDENCE -- Billy Donovan comes home tonight.

Journal photo / Scott Robinson

Billy Donovan takes the ball upcourt against Villanova in early Mrach 1987, en route to leading the Friars to the Final Four.

Comes back to the building where all his dreams once came true.

Comes back to 1987.

Yes, he's now the coach of Florida, one of the name coaches in all of college basketball, someone who has made basketball at the University of Florida important in ways it never was before, someone who brings his Gators into The Dunk tonight to play the Friars. But this is where he once made his basketball bones, where it once started.

"It will be very emotional for me," he said. "I can still remember coming in in the back of the Civic Center at the loading dock and walking down the hallway. What went on in that building has enabled me to be where I am today."

No doubt.

He was "Billy the Kid" then, the poster child for Rick Pitino's resurrection program at Providence, and one of Pitino's publicity stunts was to have Donovan pose in a cowboy hat and six guns. So what if Donovan had spent his first two years at PC as little more than a kid who looked like he had stumbled out of some CYO game, overwhelmed by the Big East, just another struggling kid on a struggling team. So what if there was even some talk of him transferring to Bryant, going down to Division II.

Pitino arrived and Donovan's life changed.

There have been so many marvelous PC basketball stories down through the years, kids who came here unnoticed and left four years later having found basketball gold. But none was as dramatic as Billy Donovan. Even now, nearly 20 years later, he still is one of the Friars' all-time great players. Not the most talented. Not one who went on to play a lot of years in the NBA. But someone who led his team to the Final Four in 1987, the signature player of the comet that was Pitino's two years at PC.

"It was a godsend that someone like that came into my life," he said.

No doubt about that, either.

Pitino's style was to press, play uptempo, shoot a lot of threes, a style Donovan had played in high school on Long Island. He was instantly reborn as a player. Pitino made Donovan lose 20 pounds, gave him the ball, and for two years he was one of the elite players in the Big East, had a senior year out of some playground fantasy.

Pitino also was the one who got him into coaching, but even that came with an asterisk. Donovan had the proverbial cup of coffee in the NBA, and when he was done playing professionally he was working on Wall Street. Then one day he ran into Ken "Jersey Red" Ford, a Pitino confidante, and asked him if he could talk to Pitino about getting into coaching.

"It's not your personality," Pitino eventually told Donovan. "You're too mild. Too meek. I don't think it's for you."

AP photo

Billy Donovan shouts instructions to his Florida players during a game against Vanderbilt last February.

Donovan didn't listen and Pitino acquiesced, offering him an entry-level position as a grad assistant at Kentucky. The rest is basketball history. And from the beginning Donovan loved coaching. Loved being in the gym. Loved working with kids. Loved recruiting. Loved all of it. It wasn't playing, but it was real close. He was the third assistant the following year, then Ralph Willard went to Western Kentucky and he moved up, an ascent that hasn't stopped yet.

Now he's one of the top young coaches in the country, already has taken Florida to the Final Four.

But he hasn't forgotten the roots.

Yesterday, he talked about the debt he owes Providence College, how the school shaped him, nurtured him, helped him in so many ways to become the person he is now. From Joe Mullaney, who recruited him, to Pitino, who resurrected him; from the staff of Stu Jackson, Jeff Van Gundy and Gordie Chiesa to support guys such as John Marinatto and Gerry Alaimo; from teachers and other students, too. In a sense, he's a product of all of them, as if his success is their success, too, for they knew him when, back when it was all up in the air, when his life could have played out differently.

He said how he hasn't been back much in the last decade or so, hasn't been back in The Dunk in 16 years, this place where all his dreams came true. And he knows it will be emotional, walking into a building he owned in the winter of 1987, back when he was "Billy the Kid" and the building rocked, and he was becoming one of the all-time great Friars. This place that made him into what he is today.

"So much of my life was shaped there," said Billy Donovan, "but I don't want the game to be about me."

Sorry, Billy.

Tonight's about you.

About coming home.