INDIANAPOLIS – On April 1, 2009, John Calipari was introduced as the new head coach of the Kentucky men’s basketball team. If he hadn’t, he says what happened to him April 6, 2015 may not have.Six years and five days after Coach Cal had been named the new UK head coach, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, becoming just the sixth active head coach in the hall.”I don’t know if Dr. (Lee) Todd and Mitch (Barnhart) didn’t come to me and say, ‘Hey, let’s talk about this Kentucky job,’ if this happens,” Coach Cal said. “If I’m not at Kentucky, I’m not sure it happens. Maybe it does, I don’t know.”It wasn’t meant to be a knock on his previous schools of Memphis or UMass, it was just that Coach Cal always wanted to coach at a premier program such as UK.Calipari has certainly made his opportunity at Kentucky count. The 56-year-old won the won the 2012 national championship, has taken the Cats to four Final Fours in the last five years and has posted the best winning percentage over a coach’s first six seasons (.832) in school history.”I always wanted to have a job like the other guys,” Coach Cal said. “…It’s not that I had any disrespect for Massachusetts or Memphis. I loved those places. I loved those jobs. But you were at the little table. You weren’t at the big table. You never got to carve the turkey. You had plastics forks and plates and that’s what it was. But I always said, ‘I wonder what would happen if I got one of those jobs.’ You know, guys that have had those jobs 20 and 30 years. I was 50 and had been coaching for 20-some years when I got the Kentucky job.”Another big moment in Cal’s career that ultimately led him to the hall of fame: failing in the NBA.After a successful run as head coach at UMass, Coach Cal tried his hand at the NBA where he went 72-112 with the New Jersey Nets before he was fired 20 games into this third season. What he learned at the next level, though, has helped him in better guiding college student-athletes to the next stage of their own careers and lives. And if he had to get fired for that to happen, Coach Cal says, then it was all worth it.”I would not trade that time for anything, because it made me a better coach and it better prepared me to teach the kids that I have now what it takes to be in that league,” Coach Cal said. “Maybe that’s why it happened. Alright, we know you’re going to have these kids so get up here. And we’re going to fire you, but at least you know what it takes for those kids. I don’t know. We look back on – and I’ll say it again, if I don’t get hired by Kentucky, am I sitting here? Maybe. Doubt it, but maybe. Why did I go to the NBA? Maybe – how many of these kids have we prepared for that? You just don’t know. You look back – the only thing I’m going to say, this that has happened for me gives me another platform to help kids and families. Even more of a platform to help them.”Handling UK’s first, only lossKentucky lost just one game all season. It just so happened to unfortunately be its last game of the season.After losing to Wisconsin 71-64 in the Final Four on Saturday night at Lucas Oil Stadium, Coach Cal joked that he’s lucky the hotel the team was staying at didn’t have windows that could open in his room. In its quest to win Kentucky its ninth national championship and become the first school in 39 years to go undefeated, the Wildcats fell just two games shy of their goal, something Calipari never imagined.”What I’m trying to do is laugh and smile and enjoy myself so I don’t cry, because it was devastating,” Coach Cal said. “I thought we were going 40-0. Never entered my mind that we would lose.”In the brief time since that game, Coach Cal says he has replayed the game in his head, but said he never watches the final game of the season in which he loses, nor will he watch the championship game Monday night between Duke and Wisconsin.”I will tell you that I wish I had a few more answers how to post the ball,” Calipari said. “I don’t know. I refuse to watch the last game tape so I won’t watch it, but I was begging, throw it – we were trying to do what we did against Notre Dame. Now maybe they fought us harder than we fought them to do it, but then that’s on me to figure out how do you get Karl the ball, not only to score, but to pass out of. There’s just so many – it’s so raw right now. But I won’t ever watch the tape.”After fighting back from an eight-point deficit earlier in the second half to take a four-point lead with less than five minutes to play, many have said Kentucky tried to slow the game down in order to take more time off the clock. The end result was that UK had three shot-clock violations in the closing minutes and went 5:40 without scoring. Being the players-first coach that he is, Coach Cal took the blame for how the Cats closed against the Badgers.”I will say this, if they want to blame me for the loss, I agree,” Calipari said. “Don’t blame these kids. If I slowed it down, I didn’t do it, Cal kicked this game, then I can live with that. I’m fine. That would make me happy.”Another aspect that helped Calipari get over Saturday’s loss was looking over to the other bench and seeing his friend Wisconsin head coach Bo Ryan, whose Badgers were defeated in the 2014 Final Four by the Cats in on a game winning 3-pointer with 5.7 seconds left.”Somebody says, how did you get over the stuff last night?” Coach Cal said. “Because Bo had to walk off that floor last year like I did, and I have to respect that. How did he feel last year? Just like I felt this year.”Development of young people still most special part of Calipari’s careerThe only way to be elected into the hall of fame is to have had one special career. For Coach Cal, the most special part isn’t that he’s won a national championship or been to six Final Fours. It isn’t the fact that he’s the only head coach to win 38 games in a single season, that he’s done that three times in his illustrious career, or that he became the first coach to ever win the first 38 games in a season. Instead, he said it’s seeing the development of the young people that go through his program.”Let me just say this, what I told the kids after the game, ‘We lost guys, and you should be hurting, but every one of you helped yourself this season. You got better. Every player improved their position and abilities, and grew, and learned to be selfless, learned to be a great teammate,’ ” Coach Cal said. “And they’re all in a position they would not have been in if they didn’t share and give up. And I told them history, you may not have gone 40-0, history will talk about this team and what they gave up for each other, and it won’t be taken away. Thirty-eight wins to start a season … I got a few more tries.”Now, with “hall of famer” beside his name, Calipari said similar to when the Cats won the national championship in 2012, it’s time to move on and continue to be about his players.”Let’s leverage all this stuff to do good,” Coach Cal said. “It’s not a relief, it’s just I’m proud, surreal, dumbfounded, but at the end of the day, I’m truly appreciative and blessed that this happened, and now we move on.”Cal to the NBA?In addition to wondering about whether several of Kentucky’s star players will leave school early to put their name in the NBA Draft, many members of the Big Blue Nation have also worried about whether Coach Cal, himself, would explore the NBA waters. The big question in regards to that is how much of a desire he has to prove himself in the NBA. “I don’t,” Calipari said. “I have one question, so you understand, and I went through some things last year, and I had a simple question for an owner: The impact I have on these young people, the impact to help change their families lives, the impact I have in the seat I’m in at Kentucky to move people in a positive way, can I have that in the NBA? Where do I get the satisfaction from? What do we do that has an impact on the community, has an impact on people, or am I just coaching to try to help you make more money and win a championship? Tell me how, because I’m at a stage in my life, that’s not what moves me.”