Providence Roots Bind Coaches Donovan and Pitino PHOENIX - The police pulled over the bus that carried the Providence basketball team from New York City to Rhode Island on March 8, 1987, and asked Coach Rick Pitino and his wife to step outside. They walked to a nearby pay phone, shaken, scared. In the next few hours, Providence would learn its opponent and location in the N.C.A.A. tournament, a cause, on any other Sunday, for celebration. First, the bus departed without Pitino, whose son, Daniel, had died of heart failure that morning. Daniel Pitino was 6 months old. The team canceled its Selection Sunday party, attended the funeral Mass later in the week, then boarded a plane to Alabama to face the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Pitino met the team there. As always, he leaned on a senior named Billy Donovan, a guard in whom Pitino saw so much of himself. Together, they took Providence to the Final Four, to New Orleans, to new heights. The lowest of lows and highest of highs combined to forge the strongest type of friendship. Donovan, who wanted to transfer when Pitino arrived his junior season, later gave up a career on Wall Street to emulate the man he called Coach. Their relationship grew stronger through the years. When Donovan won a national title at Florida, Pitino sat in the stands, tears streaming down his face. Now, 25 years after Providence's trip to the Final Four, Pitino is at fourth-seeded Louisville, one win from another Final Four, another trip to New Orleans. The more Louisville won this season, the more it exceeded expectations, the more it reminded Pitino of his favorite team, those 1986-87 Friars. But to continue the parallel, Pitino must first beat the player who most made his first Final Four trip possible, must beat Donovan and seventh-seeded Florida on Saturday in the reunion neither wanted. "As I saw the bracket unfold, I started laughing," said Mike Tranghese, a former commissioner of the Big East Conference. With Billy and Rick, there is no one either wanted to play less than each other. They are that close. Jeff Van Gundy does not need to see Donovan and Pitino on opposing benches to be reminded of that season. He says he thinks about it every day. Van Gundy worked as a graduate assistant at Providence, alongside Pitino and Herb Sendek and Stu Jackson. When Donovan elevated Providence into the national conversation, Van Gundy said he should receive 10 percent of every salary, from now to forever, for every coach on that team who went on to great success. Van Gundy argued that no player in the past 25 years was more valuable to a single team than Donovan was to Providence that season. "And no one did a better job of getting the maximum coaching out of one team than Rick Pitino did with that one," Van Gundy said. You saw coaching greatness, and you saw playing greatness, and you saw it every day. The season started with Donovan on the cover of the Providence media guide, dressed in a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and spurs. John Marinatto, now commissioner of the Big East, then served as Providence's sports information director. He rented the costume from a local shop and persuaded Pitino to persuade Donovan to wear it. "Yeah, yeah, that was me," Marinatto confessed Friday. Van Gundy's review? The hokiest, corniest thing I've ever seen. He looked like a kid dressed up for Halloween. He still had that baby face. Thank God marketing has come a long way. Providence entered the season with limited expectations. Pitino liked to call the team the Blue Collar Friars, and they took pictures in construction hats to underline that theme. He wanted them to be "the hardest-working team in America," and he meant it. The Friars, Marinatto said, practiced for an hour between classes, in the afternoon and again at night after a two-hour study hall. Some think the N.C.A.A. enacted limits on practice time in large part because of them. Donovan said this week that he lived in fear of Pitino - "We all lived in fear back then," Marinatto said - who told assistants they should remain with him no longer than three years, so intense was the environment. What Donovan feared most was missing something on the scouting report, which Pitino would inevitably uncover on his own. That season was the first in college basketball with a 3-point line. Pitino exploited it like no other coach, and in game notes, Marinatto wrote that "Rick Pitino is like Panasonic - slightly ahead of his time." Donovan remembered that many coaches were opposed to the 3-pointer, while Pitino, Donovan said, "changed the way that people looked at it." Donovan practically lived in the gym, even asking the graduate assistant Sean Kearney to meet him there on New Year's Eve. Pitino worked Donovan just as hard, told him he impersonated a sieve in that everything went by and through him. Before that N.C.A.A. tournament, Dave Gavitt, the founder of the Big East, told Tranghese the Friars would surprise people. "You're crazy, Dave," Tranghese responded. Providence, a sixth seed, toppled U.A.B., Austin Peay, Alabama and Georgetown, each upset more shocking than the last. Syracuse ended the run in the Final Four. Ralph Willard, an assistant on that team and Pitino's longtime friend, said the Orange designed their defense to stop Donovan's penetration. "What Rick did is the single best coaching job I've ever seen in my lifetime," Tranghese said. Pitino said he still calls Donovan "Billy the Kid," still thinks about him constantly, even "felt better when he won the title than when I won it." Two men who were so different in personality ended up sharing the same drive, the same profession. Their teams play similarly, too, play aggressively, with pressure, never slowing down. When Pitino saw Willard in New York during the Big East tournament, he kept returning to the parallel, to the Friars of 1987 and the Cardinals of 2012. Those who knew Pitino and Donovan then must confront a conflict of emotions Saturday, when one is certain to win at the other's expense. "I just root for no one to get hurt," Marinatto said.