Last Thursday night, New Albany High School's Romeo Langford, the No. 2 junior in all of high school basketball, hosted La Lumiere's Brian Bowen, the 13th-ranked senior. In prep hoops world, this was big -- big enough to earn a prime-time spot on ESPN2, in fact, and thus big enough to lure household-name college coaches out of practice gyms and onto charter jets.

New Albany High School sits 15 minutes north of the Louisville campus, just over the Indiana side of the Ohio River. Louisville coach Rick Pitino didn't have to arrange air travel. Otherwise, though, it was your standard recruiting routine: show up, find a seat, be seen -- most crucially, by the prospect you're targeting (Langford), but also, probably, by a television camera or two -- grant a few selfie requests, and dip.

Which is more or less what Pitino was doing when a funny thing happened.

Midway through the game's first quarter, ESPN2's camera cut to a shot of the coach with an accompanying identification chyron. And there it was, next to a familiar U and K intertwined in royal blue: "Rick Pitino, Kentucky Head Coach."

The resulting screenshot was fodder for more than a few jokes, even from Pitino's own players. It surely made for a few subconsciously uncomfortable gut reactions from fans on both sides of the Kentucky-Louisville blood feud.

More than anything, though, the image felt like a brief glimpse into an alternate metaphysical realm. What if it was right? What if in 1997 -- after Pitino had rebuilt Kentucky from the scandalous ashes of the Eddie Sutton era, restored the program to its blue-blood glory, won the 1996 national title and very nearly repeated a year later -- the siren song of the Boston Celtics hadn't tempted him off course? What if he had listened to the offer to be head coach, general manager, CEO and president of one of the sport's iconic franchises and, against all odds, said, Nah, I'm good.

"My biggest mistake I made in my life is when I left Camelot," Pitino said in 2011.

As Pitino and Louisville prepare to face his former program for the 16th time since his return to college basketball on Wednesday night (7 ET, ESPN/WatchESPN), we can't help but wonder: What if he hadn't made it?

What if he'd stayed? What if the chyron was right? How different would college basketball be?

Mike Krzyzewski's lead in career wins wouldn't be so great if Rick Pitino had remained on the Kentucky sideline. Lance King/Getty Images

AT LEAST ONE PORTION of this alternate history experiment is easy: Pitino would have a lot more wins.

The math here is fairly straightforward. Prior to the 2016-17 season -- when the Cardinals are 10-1 and playing the stingiest per-possession defense (adjusted, per KenPom.com) in the country, for what it's worth -- Pitino won 745 games as a head coach at the Division I level. After a six-game interim stint at Hawaii in 1975-76, he got his first full-time job in 1978 at Boston University, where he stayed until 1983 before leaving to become an assistant for the New York Knicks. He returned to the college ranks at Providence in 1985, spent one season rebuilding, and the next riding some kid named Billy Donovan to a surprise Final Four, at which point he went back to the Knicks, this time as head coach.

Two seasons later, Pitino was in Camelot, though the Sutton era's very real flirtation with the NCAA's death penalty had left the famed round table in fixer-upper shape. The Wildcats won 14 games in Pitino's first season and 22 (plus a regular-season conference title) in his second; they were ineligible for the postseason during both campaigns. Then came 1991-92, at which point it was, as the kids say, on. For the next six seasons, Kentucky never won fewer than 27 games, established an "average" season of 31 wins and five losses per, and won either the regular-season or SEC tournament titles all six years, culminating with "The Untouchables" -- the 1996 national championship team featuring nine future NBA players, among them Antoine Walker, Derek Anderson, Tony Delk, Walter McCarty, Ron Mercer and Nazr Mohammed.

All told, Pitino has 30 full seasons under his belt. His average wins total per season: 24.8. Multiply that by nine -- the number of years he spent in the NBA -- and you get 223.2, or 986 career wins, which would rank second (or third, depending on whether you're accounting for Jim Boeheim's recently vacated 101 wins) among active coaches. Only Mike Krzyzewski would have more.

But even if our totally real alternate-reality-affecting time machine reaches back to just 1997, and we account for only the five years Pitino spent with the Celtics, that's still another 124 wins -- still enough to rank third behind Coach K and Boeheim, with a healthy lead on Bob Huggins, who just won his 800th game on Saturday.

Pitino doesn't need these wins for affirmation. He is already a Hall of Famer, already the only man to lead two different teams to national titles, already the first coach in the history of the sport to take three different teams to the Final Four. He is also a bona fide defensive genius, arguably the best defensive mind in the history of the college game -- a fact that is evident any time the Cardinals take the floor, and no matter what the result means for their coach's career tally.

Still: As Krzyzewski runs up the score on his all-time wins total, it is worth noting that Pitino, five years younger, wouldn't have been all that far behind. And that the state in which he left Kentucky makes "24.8 wins per season" sound like an extremely conservative estimate, even over the long run. And that, more likely than not, the Wildcats would have grabbed at least one or two more national titles along the way.

Odds are, the world in which Pitino is still the coach at UK is one in which the debate over the greatest collegiate coach of this generation is not quite so clear cut -- and Krzyzewski's record doesn't seem quite so unassailable.

Both John Calipari's and Rick Pitino's lives would be different had the latter never left Kentucky. Jeff Moreland/Icon Sportswire

AS WILD AS THOSE POSSIBILITIES ARE, the impact of Pitino's 1997 decision is far more profound than career win totals and goofy arguments in sports bars. With apologies to the winner of the "Choice Movie: Thriller" category at the 2004 Teen Choice Awards, the butterfly effect of a hypothetical three-decade Pitino dynasty in Lexington, Kentucky, is almost as mind-blowing as that scene where baby Ashton Kutcher strangles himself with his own umbilical cord. (No, for real. That happened in that movie. Spoiler alert?)

For example: Tubby Smith. Pitino's associate head coach at UK replaced his boss, inherited a team led by Mohammed, Scott Padgett and Jeff Sheppard (and featuring a young Jamaal Magloire) and went on to win the school's seventh national title. How different might Smith's career have been -- from that immediate success to the way many UK fans (sometimes fair, sometimes not) eventually turned against him -- had Smith sought out his first high-profile head-coaching job elsewhere?

What about Billy Gillispie? In 2007, Smith's replacement greeted the nation's most intense fan base with a sterling record for program turnarounds and an immensely unhealthy set of life habits. In retrospect, perhaps it might have been better for a dude who openly admitted that he slept four hours a night, didn't buy groceries for six months at a time, and got divorced because he couldn't balance work and family -- a guy who recently retired from coaching at a small community college in Texas, on doctor's orders, because of blood pressure issues -- to not subject himself to the most pressure-packed position in the sport. Who knows how Gillispie's path might have changed?

And then, of course, there's John Calipari -- and the game itself. Since he was hired in Lexington in 2009, the Kentucky head coach has redefined the relationship between coaches and programs. He has leveraged the immense resources available to him, and his own inimitable marketing ability, to make Kentucky less of a basketball program than a self-sustaining cycle of crackling hype. And he has backed it up, year in and year out, with teams that compete for national titles. He is already, by far, the most successful UK coach since Pitino -- and one who has put somewhere just shy of a gazillion Wildcats into the NBA ranks.

In the meantime, the game has changed around him. No less than Duke has co-opted the one-and-done affinity Calipari perfected almost immediately upon his arrival at Rupp Arena. The game has literally changed. Where would Calipari be, if not UK? Memphis? Somewhere else? Would he have unleashed his freshman-fueled grand plan, to this degree, anywhere else? How different would the experience of watching college basketball feel?

And those are just the principles. There are dozens of other coaches and players whose careers might have played out differently. Imagine a reality in which former Louisville assistant Mick Cronin hadn't restored Cincinnati to annual solidity. Or one in which Russ Smith didn't have a platform from which to share his gifts. Imagine a world wherein Pitino didn't hire a consultant calling himself the "shot doctor" (Andy Enfield), who would go on to build one of the most enjoyable March stories (Dunk City-era Florida Gulf Coast) of the past decade. Think about how each of the names on Pitino's coaching tree -- or any of his 16 Louisville rosters -- might have been different.

Think about a world in which "Larry Bird isn't walking through that door" references didn't exist. It's hard, right?

Though he has said in the past that it was a mistake to leave Kentucky, Rick Pitino now thinks things worked out the way they needed to and he belongs at Louisville. Jim Dedmon-USA TODAY Sports

FOR YEARS, Pitino was consistent: Leaving Kentucky (or Camelot, whichever you prefer) was the biggest mistake of his life. Or, at the very least, a "regret." It would have been easy to couch the entire decision in terms of trying new things and learning about yourself and only living once. Instead, Pitino was admirably honest.

In 2013, though, after Louisville won the national title, things changed.

"People always ask me the question, 'Do you regret leaving Kentucky?'" Pitino told a gathering of Louisville-area business professionals at the time. "'If you didn't leave, you'd have a thousand wins today.' I say, 'No.'" The greatest move I ever made was leaving Kentucky. The second-greatest move I ever made was failing in Boston. Because if I didn't go through those two experiences, I wouldn't have gained humility."

What the rest of us wouldn't have gained will be on display Wednesday night.

Whatever its other effects, Pitino's decision to leave Kentucky got him, one way or the other, to Louisville. Where, aided by history, boosted by Calipari's eventual arrival in the state, and driven by UK fans' sense of deep personal betrayal, Pitino's career trajectory sparked a gloriously hateful flame on perhaps the best rivalry in college sports. Both on and off the floor, in the modern game, there's nothing quite like UL vs. UK.

In the alternate dimension where "Rick Pitino" is still "Kentucky Head Coach," none of this exists. The only reasonable scientific conclusion to this complicated thought experiment is two words long:

No thanks.