Given the all the realities and possibilities, John Calipari was the best hire the University of Kentucky could make. He is everything his predecessor wasn’t – and more. He will control the media, charm the fans, get more than his share of the nation’s best recruits, and hang new championship banners in Rupp Arena. And he will do it with style and humor and excitement.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say I think Calipari will win an NCAA title in Lexington before Rick Pitino does in Louisville. Think about it. The last two seasons the Cardinals have let golden opportunities slip away. Now the retooling and recruiting game is on, both at UK and U of L, and Calipari is every bit as cutting-edge in every respect as Pitino.

The main question about Calipari is his integrity as a recruiter. The NCAA turned his 1996 Final Four team at Massachusetts into “Vacated” because star player Marcus Camby had received all sorts of illegal benefits from an agent.

At Memphis, Calipari landed notorious “one-and-done” players DeJuan Wagner and Derrick Rose through his close connection with “street agents,” who have replaced high school coaches and parents as the players’ most-trusted advisors.

A nefarious character known as “Worldwide Wes” stirred both Rose and Tyreke Evans, the freshman star of this season’s Memphis team, to Calipari in exchange for…what? Nothing illegal, apparently. The NCAA has sniffed around Calipari’s programs but never uncovered enough evidence to hit him with sanctions.

This time around, in order to avoid another embarrassment like the hiring of Billy Clyde Gillispie two years ago, UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart turned to a “basketball man” who has the contacts that Barnhart doesn’t. I’m talking about Mike Pratt, the former star UK player under Adolph Rupp, the former head coach at UNC-Charlotte, and the current radio sidekick of play-by-play man Tom Leach.

Pratt worked the cell phones hard over the weekend, calling almost everybody he knew to ask about Calipari. He got very little negative feedback. The clincher in Calipari’s favor was Southeastern Conference Commissioner Mike Slive, who met Calipari when he was commissioner of Conference USA.

Slive may be the best SEC commissioner ever because he stopped the probation parade that had characterized the league in both football and mens basketball. He also negotiated a lucrative new TV deal with ESPN in which most conference games in basketball, football and other sports will be on TV sometime, somewhere.

For that deal to succeed to its maximum possibility, it’s essential that Kentucky, the league’s gold standard in men’s basketball, be strong and viable and probation-free. So there’s no way Slive would have given his blessing to the Calipari hiring – and he did – if he thought there was going to be wholesale cheating in Lexington.

When Barnhart fired Dizzy Gillispie after the worst-coached team in UK history had played its final game, he hadn’t talked to anybody. But he had been assured by two prominent Wildcat boosters, one of whom is connected to a major shoe company, that Billy Donovan was ready to leave Florida and come to Lexington.

But when Pratt checked that out, he was surprised to find out that Donovan had no intention of leaving Gainesville, which Billy D. soon confirmed in a press release. The other top option was Michigan State’s Tom Izzo. Some of his associates had contacted UK and told them Izzo was seriously interested in the UK job. But that didn’t check out, either, so UK began looking at its other options, including Bob Knight. After weighing Knight’s pros and cons, Barnhart and UK President Lee Todd decided to keep looking.

When they inquired about Calipari, they were surprised to find out that the Memphis coach was more than interested in talking. In fact, he almost was literally sitting by the phone, waiting for it to ring. He had done the same thing when UK was looking for Tubby Smith’s successor, and, he told friends, couldn’t understand why he didn’t get at least a call from Barnhart.

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It turns out that Calipari had been intrigued by the Wildcat program since 1992, when he brought a weary UMass team to Lexington on the way home from the Great Alaskan Shootout. That night the Wildcats gained more than a victory. They won a fan who told his wife, “That’s the kind of place I’d like to be someday.”

So UK and Calipari met last Sunday and hammered out the details. At the end, all that stood between Calipari and the nation’s winningest program was his deep affinity for Memphis and his players. He was happy in Memphis and Memphis certainly was happy with him. In fact, when his interest in the UK job surfaced, Memphis boosters did everything but give him a FedEx plane in order to keep him.

But dominating Conference USA, which he has done for years and would have done for the foreseeable future, wasn’t satisfying enough for Calipari. At the age of 50, he was ready to see if he could succeed at the highest level of all. He told his team that UK was to college basketball what Notre Dame was to college football – an apt analogy, considering how both those programs have struggled in recent years, but not what Calipari meant. He was talked about the unmatched history and tradition, and he was right.

Calipari will have some very small shoes to fill. Gillispie was so wrong for UK, in so many ways, that it’s incredible, in retrospect, that he ever could have been hired. But at least give Barnhart the credit for admitting his mistake, even if only tacitly, and pulling Dizzy’s plug before he could inflict any more damage on the program built by Rupp and nurtured by Joe B. Hall, Pitino, and Smith. (I’m leaving out Eddie Sutton purposely because, while a much better coach than Gillispie, he took the program to the brink of ruin in four seasons.)

In a preview of coming attractions, Calipari hit all the right notes at yesterday’s press conference that confirmed his hiring. He mentioned his friendship with Bill Keightley, the late equipment manager who was known as “Mr. Wildcat.” he invoked the names of Wildcat legends Kyle Macy, Dan Issel, Richie Farmer, Rex Chapman, and Jeff Sheppard. He recognized Rupp’s son Herky, sitting in the audience, and said he had called all the former UK coaches to pay his respects and pick their brains.

And you could almost hear the clucks of approval in Eastern Kentucky when he mentioned that his father had been a West Virgina coal miner who died from black lung at the age of 58. He made it clear that he didn’t see himself as being any better than anybody else, but that he did see himself as a “gatherer,” one who draws on lots of different people to building a winning organization.

“When we win a championship,” Calipari said, “there are going to be 10,000 different people saying, ‘Well, they couldn’t have done that without me.’ Our program is not about me – it’s about the players. We are the commonwealth’s team and we are here to serve the commonwealth.”

If there was a slight dig at Pitino and Louisville in there, it probably was intended. Right away Calipari was drawing a line in the sand: Louisville is Louisville’s team, but Kentucky is the commonwealth’s team. It was a nuance that he got right away and that Gillispie never would have been able to articulate if he had stayed at UK for 50 years.

When UK hired Pitino in 1989, I wrote that he had a lot in common with Rupp, including the fact that both loved to play an uptempo style. Heck, in the 1940s, Rupp had as much as anyone to do with popularizing the fast break. Until the “Fabulous Five” came along to win NCAA titles in 1948 and ’49, most teams were playing the conservative game taught best by Hank Iba at Oklahoma A&M.

Like Rupp and Pitino, Calipari loves to run and gun. He’s considered a master of the “dribble drive” offense, which is fast replacing Knight’s motion, read-and-react offense as the attack of choice at those places which have enough good athletes to play that style.

When Indiana hired Kelvin Sampson, I criticized the Hoosiers for compromising the principles and standards that had been the norm for 29 years under Knight. Unfortunately, I turned out to be right. But I don’t see Calipari becoming UK’s version of Sampson. IU hired Sampson despite the fact that he was under NCAA investigation at Oklahoma, so they had a big red flag waving right in their faces. But Calipari comes to UK with a clean slate. He was absolved of blame in the Camby scandal at UMass, and his program at Memphis has been tainted only by gossip.

So it seems that Calipari and UK were made for each other, and I mean that without the slightest bit of sarcasm. Whatever happens with the youngsters Calipari was recruiting at Memphis, I look for UK to be a Top 25 contender next season if Jodie Meeks and Patrick Patterson come back for their senior and junior seniors, respectively. They certainly will learn more about getting ready for the NBA than they ever could have learned under Gillispie.

I think it’s the best hire UK could have made – better even than Donovan or Izzo. I think Barnhart has corrected The Big Mistake. Understand, I will be one of the first to hold Calipari accountable if he breaks the promises he made yesterday. But the guy at least deserves the benefit of the doubt.

And you had to love it when he was asked about hanging a championship banner at UK and said, only half-kiddingly, “Why not double the ones we have here?”