Around lunchtime Tuesday, a pair of tweets from the account of @UKCoachCalipari popped up on my feed.
They said:
My first call this morning was from Billy Donovan, giving me advice on all the aftermath that I will have to deal with from winning a title.
Billy has been a great friend and I really appreciated his call. We just boarded the plane and should be leaving for Lexington soon.
Nice words from the Kentucky coach, mere hours after leading the Wildcats (who swept three games from the Gators this season) to their eighth national championship. Of course, it was John Calipari's first title and Gators coach Billy Donovan, who has known “Cal” for years and understands -- thanks to those back-to-back national crowns in 2006 and '07 -- what the newest member to the NC club is about to go through.
So I popped over to the UF basketball office this afternoon. Donovan said he left Calipari a voice message around 6:30 a.m., and got a return call about a half-hour later.
The two spoke for about 20 minutes. 
“First, I told him congratulations and that I was happy for him and really respected the way his team played all the way through the entire year,” Donovan said. “They kept their composure. They were unselfish. I thought they were a really, really good team.”
Then the conversation morphed into a more philosophical outlook.
“I talked more in terms of enjoying this,” Donovan said. “About how his internal peace and happiness can't be predicated on what you gain from this experience and how you go about enjoying it. And one of the hardest things about it, like I told him, is when you win it all and people say, 'Did you enjoy it?' Well, what do you do to enjoy it?”
Calipari wasn't sure how he was going to enjoy it -- some coaches take time to soak it in, while others dive right back into the job -- but he did tell Donovan he was surrounded in the post-game aftermath by a handful of friends he grew up with in Pittsburgh, as well as others he came to know along his coaching at Massachusetts, in the NBA, at Memphis and eventually to Lexington.
“A lot of things came full circle for him,” Donovan said. “But I like John. And, like I said, I was happy for him.”
