PROVIDENCE — In a perfect world, Jim Larranaga could return to his alma mater and enjoy a welcome home to Providence College with trumpets blaring sometime this week. But it won’t be that easy.

Larranaga, the current coach at George Mason University, has emerged as the favorite to become PC’s next basketball coach. He has met with PC officials during the last two days but was in Virginia yesterday, and the proverbial ball is now in his court. But this is no easy decision.

Larranaga, 58, is facing two very different career paths. The one on the left offers an aggressive road where he can rise to the top of his profession, regularly compete against the premier coaches in the country on national television and work with the security of a five- or six-year contract that could pay upwards of $900,000 per year.

The route on his right is much safer. He can continue to live in the same community that he’s called home for the last 11 years and look to build on a legacy where he’s already Mason’s all-time winningest coach. Doing so in the Colonial Athletic Association will certainly prove much easier than life in the Big East.

Larranaga is already very well compensated. His current contract runs through 2012 and pays him roughly $600,000 per season.

Thanks largely to Mason’s run to the Final Four in 2006, Larranaga is a big name at the large public school in Fairfax, Va. That two-week run was the greatest Cinderella story in the last 30 years of the NCAA Tournament, one that not only shined a spotlight on George Mason but also its captivating coach who became a media darling and highly desired public speaker in the year after the win.

The winning continued over the last two years, including a 23-11 record and another spot in the NCAAs last month. That’s only helped cement Larranaga’s place in history at the school where he clearly can retire happy. There’s even talk of building a practice facility and naming the court at the 10,000-seat Patriot Center in his honor one day.

The George Mason team that was eliminated from the NCAA Tournament by Notre Dame lost the final two stars that remained from the 2006 squad — Will Thomas and Folarin Campbell. Restocking the program and remaining atop the CAA is no given, but Larranaga is clearly the figurehead of the program, if not the school.

“Three years ago at these press conferences, nobody ever heard of us,” Larranaga said in Denver after the Notre Dame loss. “Most people thought George Mason was a small, private school. Nobody understood that we’re the largest state university in the state of Virginia and that we have an incredible law school. We take great pride in having two Nobel Prize winners. Now people ask and the cliché has become, ‘Who’s the next George Mason?’ I think this class is very responsible for that.”

If Larranaga chooses to accept the challenge of coaching at Providence, he’ll walk into a familiar building. The PC coach’s office sits in Alumni Hall, where the 6-foot-4 New Yorker played as a collegian. He averaged a team-high 19.4 points as a sophomore, 16.3 as a junior and 13.7 as a senior after being joined in the backcourt by flashy newcomer Ernie DiGregorio.

Larranaga owes much of his basketball acumen to his PC years. After playing for legendary New York City prep coach Jack Curran at Archbishop Molloy, he was recruited by Joe Mullaney and was coached for two seasons by Hall of Famer Dave Gavitt.

“I have great memories of my college days at Providence College. I enjoyed the experience of playing with some outstanding players like Ernie DiGregorio,” Larranaga said during the 2006 NCAAs. “I also played for two legendary coaches — Joe Mullaney, who taught me an awful lot about the game of basketball from a coach’s point of view, and coach (Dave) Gavitt, who really not only taught me a lot about the game of basketball, but about the business of basketball, the life of basketball, the role of a coach.”

kmcnamar@projo.com