INDIANAPOLIS – He met the world with a Lion King moment, his breeder holding him aloft while 9,100 fans at Hinkle Fieldhouse roared. He yawned, because that’s what a 7-week-old puppy does, and also because Butler Blue III – you can call him Trip – has always known how to manage a moment. Well, except for that time he couldn’t manage his lunch at Madison Square Garden, seconds before the 2015 Big East Tournament began, leaving a small gift in the lane. We’ll get back to that.

Seven years after his Lion King moment in 2012, Trip is the most adored creature on campus, and one of the most famous English bulldogs in the world. He has been in more than 320 homes in 21 states to deliver good news to Butler applicants. He has met mayors and Governors and cancer patients. He has been to basketball arenas all over the country, including Madison Square Garden in 2015, where he …

Hey, didn’t I say we’d get back to that?

Four years later, Butler president Jim Danko is remembering that day in New York City, trying not to laugh out loud.

“Getting sick on the Madison Square Garden court,” Danko is musing. “You cannot buy that kind of publicity. Not at a school like Butler.

“It reminds me of our basketball program. We’re kind of this little David program that keeps getting Goliath results, whether it’s our Final Four appearances or our mascot.”

Indeed, they are synonymous now, Butler basketball and its English Bulldog. Some days, it’s hard to say which has become bigger. That’s a fun little discussion for another time.

The discussion today is bittersweet, because Trip is nearly 8 and it is time. On Tuesday morning he will announce his coming retirement. So will the man who raised, loved and unleashed him – and his predecessor, Blue II – on the world. Michael Kaltenmark also will retire at the end of the 2019-20 school year.

Kaltenmark didn’t start Butler’s live mascot program, but he perfected it, and it will continue next year with another bulldog and another handler. But this is the end of an era, the final season of Trip and his ubiquitous owner, Michael, who hasn’t just owned the dog, handled the dog, loved the dog.

For a few years there, he was the dog.

'I'm just the schmuck'

It rained every time he came to campus. That’s what Michael Kaltenmark remembers about his visits to Butler as a senior at Northfield High in 1998. The weather made him spend his campus visits inside.

“It helped me see the real beauty of that place – its people,” Kaltenmark says. “Every time I went, I got a really good feeling. I stressed over (my college decision) until finally I had an epiphany: ‘I need to go to the place that feels the best.’ Must have picked a good one. Still there.”

Not leaving, either. Kaltenmark isn’t retiring from Butler, just from the live mascot program, passing it to his hand-picked successor, 2016 Butler graduate Evan Krauss. Kaltenmark, 39, will continue his other full-time gig, the external relations job he hasn’t given as much attention as he’d like, managing Butler’s role in the small, residential neighborhood of Butler-Tarkington.

“I’ve lost sleep over it,” he says. “I’m always thinking: ‘Man, I need to commit more to this to help Butler be at its best.’”

A gung-ho type, Michael Kaltenmark. He played three sports at Northfield – football, baseball, basketball – even if he rarely played. He just wanted to be part of the team, you know? And it continued at Butler, where he immediately joined the women’s basketball pep squad before spotting a bulletin board flyer at his dorm, Ross Hall:

Mascot tryout. Can you be the Butler Bulldog?

“I was like: Now this, I think I can do,” he says. “It was right up my alley. I’m just the schmuck willing to dance around in a sweaty, stinky bulldog costume.”

And it was that, all right. Several students took turns in the costume, depending on the number of games that day, and Kaltenmark often found himself wearing someone else’s sweat. He did that for four years, then graduated, then took a job on campus. He never left, remember? He was a fundraiser at first, but wasn’t passionate about fundraising.

“I was passionate about Butler,” he says.

And dogs. All his life, dogs.

Brad Stevens: 'Only Michael'

He grew up in Wabash with an old mutt that lived 18 years. Remember the movie dog Benji? Looked like that. Michael Kaltenmark loved that dog. He loved any dog, freaking his parents out when he’d run up to a stranger’s dog, putting his face in the dog’s face, kissing it.

So there he is two years after graduation, sitting in one of those boring staff meetings in 2004, when the meeting suddenly gets interesting. See, Butler has had a live mascot since 2000, when Kaltenmark was a sophomore in that sweaty dog costume. Blue I was owned by 1991 Butler grad and alumni office employee Kelli Walker. It was a stroke of genius, but a modest stroke. She’d bring Blue to campus on Fridays, and to big sports events. Blue was an institution, but a local one. At that staff meeting, someone announced Kelli was leaving for another job, and taking Blue with her.

Kaltenmark’s hand shot up. Now he’s raising a question he’d never considered until this moment:

“Are we going to get another dog,” he’s asking, “and can I be the one to work with it?”

Here's what inspired her:WZPL DJ Nikki Reed will donate kidney to a stranger

That’s how it happened. Kaltenmark got Blue II from the same breeder who’d provided Blue I, “and I kind of put my marketing mind to it: What’s best for the dog, what’s best for Butler? I just ran with it. I didn’t ask for permission, barely asked for forgiveness – I just ran with it.

“The first thing I got to work on was awareness and understanding. My wife was in grad school, no kids, but I had this puppy and we went to everything. If you had a bake sale on campus, I took the dog there. We created this foundation of awareness and understanding, and the real lightning in the bottle happened when we went to the Final Four two times. That’s when Butler Blue became a household name and blew the lid off the thing.”

Blue II became a Butler superstar, along with a young coach named Brad Stevens. He's moved on, but send Stevens a text about Michael Kaltenmark retiring, and he responds instantly. If you want this crazy story in a single sentence, here it is: The coach of the Boston Celtics owes a debt to Michael Kaltenmark’s live mascot program.

“Michael is a great person whose spirit and enthusiasm for Butler is really unmatched,” Stevens says. “When he first started using all his different platforms to tell Butler’s story through Blue’s (now Trip’s) lens, none of us could have predicted how much of a positive impact that would have had on the school. There’s only one person that I know that could have done that, and that’s Michael.”

It grew so big, but it started small. Before the front page of the New York Times, Blue II was a puppy in the back seat of a Honda. And he wasn’t the right puppy.

That one died.

Wrong dog, right Blue II

“I’ve got the dog for you.”

That’s what the breeder in Lizton, Frank King, told Kaltenmark in 2004. Kong King Kennel had provided Blue I to Kelli Walker, and in 2004 he had three new puppies. Two were male, and one was perfect: Playful, fearless. Michael went to see him at 4 weeks, played with him – and the other two puppies; the guy loves dogs – and came back three weeks later to take him home. But that dog had gotten sick and died.

“Well,” Frank King had said, offering the other male, “this one’s good, too. He’ll do for you.”

Says Kaltenmark, now: “I think it was fate. Blue II was born for the role. He was fantastic.”

On the drive back, Blue II was crying in a crate in the back of Kaltenmark’s 1992 Honda Wagon Accord. Kaltenmark barely got to Brownsburg, 10 miles down the road, when he pulled over and put Blue II on his lap for the rest of the way home.

That puppy became almost as big as the little giant brewing on the Butler basketball court, a national story. And a local one, too. Kaltenmark took Blue II to elementary schools all over the state, always bringing a book to promote reading. That got Kaltenmark to thinking: “Man, it would be cool if we had our own book to read, and I’d leave it behind.”

“Good Boy, Blue!” was published in 2014, so popular it required a second printing. By then, Frank King had called Kaltenmark with news of another litter of bulldogs. Kaltenmark misunderstood, asking: “You want me to promote it?”

“No,” King told him. “I want you to take one.”

Take one? Blue II was part of the family. When Michael’s wife Tiffany was pregnant, Blue II knew it and became protective of her. When their first child, Everett, would cry as a baby, Blue II would lie by his door.

Turns out, a typical English Bulldog’s lifespan ranges from 8-12 years, and Blue II was 9. That’s why Frank King was calling, telling him about the puppies in Lizton. Kaltenmark took one home in 2012. Sure enough, within a year, Blue II died of congestive heart failure.

It was Trip’s time.

About Madison Square Garden ...

That dog.

He drives Kaltenmark crazy, you know. Trip does. Show Trip a basketball – and in his line of work, he sees a lot of basketballs – and Trip will go lunging toward it, 60 pounds of muscle, trying to eat the damn thing.

But he’s not that way all the time. The Kaltenmarks have two boys now: Everett, 9, and Miles, 5.

“Balls are ricocheting all over our place, and Trip won’t get off the couch. He won’t even raise an eyebrow,” Kaltenmark says. “That drives me insane, too: ‘I know you know!’”

Michael is laughing. He knows he’s giving Trip human attributes, and part of that comes with the territory. He’s been tweeting on Trip’s behalf for years, channeling what he thinks Trip would say, referring to himself as “Pops.” Also, he’s had Trip for almost eight years. He knows the dog.

“Trip knows when it’s showtime,” he says. “If we’re going to a basketball game, (Trip knows): 'It’s all about me, and I’m going to go berserk.' When I take him to Eskenazi (Hospital), I’m like: ‘Who is this dog?’ He’s just phenomenal, like he’s been trained as a therapy dog. But take him to Hinkle, and it’s Jekyll and Hyde. Completely different personality.”

You ready for the Madison Square Garden story? It starts with Michael Kaltenmark carrying a handful of Gatorade towels into the lane. Fans are pointing their phones and giggling. Officials at MSG are pointing fingers. Not giggling.

One Butler assistant coach, Emerson Kampen, is staring at the gift Butler’s mascot has left in the lane. This is the Big East Tournament. Is that … vomit?

Here comes Kaltenmark and Trip onto the court, and they’re smiling. You know Trip. He’s always smiling, even if he’s not. Who can tell? He looks cheerful, in any event, and Kaltenmark is practically beaming. He’s not happy this happened, don’t get the wrong idea, but he’s owning it.

Kaltenmark cleans up after Trip, deposits the towels in the trash and hurries behind the Butler bench. He grabs his phone, sees social media going berserk – “Butler’s mascot just vomited on the court,” reads one tweet from CBSSports.com, with pictorial proof – and joins the fray.

“Go big or go home,” Trip writes from his account, @ButlerBlue3, above a retweet of the CBSSports.com picture. The tweet goes viral, another chapter in this remarkable story of bulldog and basketball.

All stories have a final page. Kaltenmark always knew it would come, but he didn’t know how this story of man-and-dog would end, with the sobering news that one of them had a fatal condition.

And not the dog.

'Then the kidney thing happened'

Five years? Did the doctor just give me five years to live?

That’s what Kaltenmark was thinking in December. He’d been living with the inflammatory bowel disorder Crohn’s disease for years, but after medication damaged his kidneys, he’d switched to a vegan diet and been managing just fine. A gifted triathlete, he has run the Mini-Marathon at a sub-7-minute pace. He runs a 10K in less than 40 minutes. Well, once upon a time. Lately, it seemed like he’d been running with an emergency brake. That’s what he told the doctor at IU Health when he went in for tests in December.

The doctor told him: Your kidneys are failing. Within four years – five, tops – they'll shrivel up and die. The average wait for a kidney transplant is seven years, so …

“The math doesn’t work,” Kaltenmark says.

Kaltenmark’s first thought was to ask his two older brothers for a kidney, hoping for a match, but doctors told him: No. Increase your odds, use your platform, and put out a request. Reluctantly, Kaltenmark crafted a social media post in late April.

Within 48 hours IU Health was turning people away, saying they’d “received an overwhelming response for your intended recipient," with offers coming from Kaltenmark’s previous walks of life: his hometown, Butler, his church, even IndyCar, where he spent six years helping a local team with marketing. A winning IndyCar driver offered a kidney, in fact.

“It was well into the hundreds,” Kaltenmark says of the donors. “I don’t wish this on anybody, but man, I do wish people could feel that sense of love from the rest of humanity. On days when I’m down I try to remind myself of that. I liken it to being eulogized while you’re still alive.”

Turns out, one of his brothers is a match. And good thing. Kaltenmark's kidneys are failing so fast, his body so tired, that he ran the Mini-Marathon in May in less than two hours – slow, for him – but five months later he can run only a quarter-mile before stopping to walk.

“The last few months,” Kaltenmark says, “it’s like I’m stuck in low gear with the e-break on, and I’m trying to go uphill. But I’m happy to be alive and just get out.”

His story will end well, he’s sure of it, but he’s known he wouldn’t be Butler’s mascot handler forever. His boys are 9 and 5, and Trip is nearing retirement. Kaltenmark's work in community relations has never been as efficient as he’d like, and while nobody has ever said a word to him about that, he knows. Even so, he assumed he had another decade or so with a dog.

“I’d been wrestling with it internally,” he says, “and I was like: ‘Yup, Blue IV will come and I’ll take that dog and I’ll keep going.’ I got to thinking: That’s a 10-year commitment. I’ll be 50. My kids will be graduating high school. That’s really a lot to ask. I had to do some wrestling with that, and then the kidney thing happened. That was the writing on the wall: ‘OK, dummy, it’s definitely time.’”

And it is. Evan Krauss is good with dogs, so good that when he and Kaltenmark take a Butler road trip with Trip, the sweet little dog can’t decide where to sleep. He’ll sit on the floor of their hotel room and look from bed to bed until someone scoops him up and makes the choice for him.

Butler will be fine. Blue IV will be ready. Trip will live out his days with Michael and Tiffany, and with Everett and Miles.

“His brothers,” Kaltenmark says.

But the announcement coming Tuesday is bittersweet nonetheless, the news that a Butler living legend will retire soon – a Hall of Famer, if ever there was one.

And I don't mean just the dog.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.