Gregg Popovich began the season Wednesday. He flew to San Francisco with his rebuilt staff.

It's an annual retreat; Popovich picks a different location every year to launch operations. He and his coaches will review film, and they talk about what they need to change, and in the evenings they might even have time to try a glass of wine from the region. When they return to San Antonio on Sunday, they will be ready for training camp.

But Popovich is hoping for something else, and it's that the rebooting of NBA basketball will reboot his brain.

No matter what he does, he can't get Game 6 out of his head.

Even blows to the head haven't helped. When “Jesse” James Leija puts the Spurs through boxing workouts — and he did again Wednesday — he sometimes puts gloves on Popovich.

Leija wears mitts and tells Popovich to hit them. When Popovich drops his hands, Leija slaps Popovich in the face.

Popovich tries to hit Leija back and never comes close. “It drives me crazy,” Popovich said, laughing.

And when asked if something as aggressive as boxing is a way to release anxiety held over from the 2013 NBA Finals, Popovich doesn't pull punches. “Nothing is a release,” he said.

Game 7 is a fog to him. “Was there one?” he asked. Game 6 is another matter.

Popovich doesn't second-guess himself. The same coach who often preaches that the game is simple doesn't regret benching his best defender and rebounder when the Spurs needed defense and rebounding.

He needed to defend the 3-point line, and other Spurs are better at that than Tim Duncan. This also is how the Spurs played these end-of-game situations about 20 times last season.

Still, because it was Duncan, and because Duncan had done so much to get in position to win another title, does Popovich ever wish he'd given Duncan a chance to defend the lead he had helped build?

“No,” he said. “You do what you do to win the game.”

If strategy doesn't haunt him, everything else does. “I think about Game 6 every day,” Popovich said. “Without exception. I think about every play. I can see LeBron's first shot, and the rebound, and the second ...”

Then he paused and said, “I've been quite lugubrious.”

Lugubrious?

“As sad as you can possibly be.”

He tells himself he has no right to act this way. After Duncan fell to him in the lottery, how could he ever feel sorry for himself again?

“Shut the hell up,” Popovich tells himself. “It's not all going your way.”

His daughter, Jill, told him something similar this summer. With a personality she clearly gets from her father, she said:

“OK, Dad, let me get this straight: You won four championships, and you go to a fifth Finals. Other coaches lose all the time. But poor Greggy can't lose because he's special. Can you please get over yourself? End of story.”

He stared at her — then started laughing. Hadn't his daughter told him the same get-over-yourself line he's told so many others?

“That started me on the path to recovery,” he said.

But if there's a path, it's a winding one. Even though Popovich can intellectually see where he's wrong, he can't do much about it. He'll be reading something, or watching something, and soon his mind can't help but return to Game 6. He wanted it so badly for Duncan and Manu Ginobili — and everyone else — that the final 28.2 seconds are on a ticking loop in his brain.

People tell him things will change. Eventually, he will think about Game 6 every other day, then maybe every four days, then maybe just once a week.

“I'm anxious when that begins to happen,” Popovich said, then he boarded his plane. To head toward another season.