College basketball's Indomitable Snowman finally comes inside.

Jim Boeheim, 78, leaves Syracuse basketball, but he really isn't going anywhere.

Whether Jim Boeheim ever really said this is not documented. But the fact that it sounds authentic tells you a lot.

While every other college team lusted to play holiday games in Hawaii, Syracuse rarely went. Asked why, Boeheim shrugged and said, “I’m not interested. It’s like Syracuse in July.”

If only every other institution in the Rust Belt had functioned as well for as long as Syracuse basketball did. Boeheim was the coach from the fall of 1976 until Wednesday, when the Orange lost to Wake Forest on a 3-point buzzer-beater in the first round of the ACC tournament. In a vague post-game presser, Boeheim talked about how lucky he’d been to coach long enough to have all these wins and experiences, and to coach sons Jimmy and Buddy, but he also said his future, at age 78, was “up to the administration.” A few hours later the future arrived, as Syracuse gave the chair to former Orange player Adrian Autry.

Boeheim showed up at SU in 1962. Aside from a couple of Eastern League seasons with Scranton, he has never worked or lived anywhere else since then. Like his town, he was forbidding on the surface and warm when he let others inside. People usually liked him in direct proportion to how well they knew him, which is not always the case with coaches.

Basically he just outlasted everything — critics, rivals, the politics of college athletics, changes to the game. When Syracuse doesn’t get an NIT bid last season it was the first time in 42 years that it missed the postseason entirely, at least when it wasn’t on probation or when Covid-19 hadn’t canceled everything.

Boeheim did not get to the Final Four until 1987, after Georgetown, St. John’s and Villanova had carried the Big East banner there. Georgetown and Villanova won NCAA championships. Those coaches were chummy, if you remember John Thompson wearing a replica of Lou Carnsecca’s garish good-luck sweater to a Georgetown-St. John’s showdown in Madison Square Garden. Boeheim was remote and combative, and his team played in the harsh and sprawling Carrier Dome, where “You suck” was practically embroidered on welcome mats, and where Syracuse broke NCAA single-game attendance records 13 different times.

He barked back at criticism, once saying that if he had “called time out as many times as Billy Packer said I should, I’d need 10 of them,” and he picked out lines he felt were negative in newspaper stories that were largely benign. He was a great foil, especially in the postgame bars of the Big East when he was routinely dismissed as a coach.

All along, he turned down other job offers, although there were no contract renewal talks with Syracuse. “They just put my pay raise in an envelope,” he said.

And long after those other coaches and most of those bars were gone, Boeheim wound up in five Final Fours. In 2003, with Carmelo Anthony and Gerry McNamara, the Orange beat Kansas for the NCAA championship. That was 20 years ago. The team had a reunion in Syracuse last weekend.

The Orange is now in the ACC, where visits by Clemson and Florida State don’t carry the same gravitas, and now there are yawning, empty rows in the Dome. But Boeheim has now become popular with his younger colleagues and, as far as the resume goes, ten Big East regular season titles, five Big East tournament titles, 1,015 wins and a .698 win percentage don’t hurt. Thanks largely to Boeheim and his players, Syracuse is sixth in victories nationally and seventh in win percentage, and only six schools have attended more Final Fours.

In 1986 he joked that he was actually more famous than anybody suspected. “I fly to L.A. and people look at me and say, ‘Hey, there’s Pearl’s coach,’’’ he said. Dwayne “Pearl” Washington was a mythic recruit from New York, and his no-look charisma was a massive draw. Syracuse averaged 26,225 fans at home in his final season. But in recruiting the likes of Washington, Boeheim developed a reputation as more of a salesman than a coach. In truth, he had two players, Anthony and Danny Schayes, who played 1,000 or more NBA games, and today Syracuse has only one, Jerami Grant, who is getting starter’s minutes in the league. Anthony and Derrick Coleman are the only Orange alums coached by Boeheim who averaged over 15 points in the pros.

Boeheim was generally ahead of the game. The Big East was a brutal, midcourt league in its best times, with a ton of 60-55 games, but Boeheim liked to play fast, in the 80s, even without a 3-pointer. Syracuse wasn’t a great defensive team until Boeheim refined a 2-3 zone defense that was poison for favored teams in the NCAA tournament, as Kansas and Virignia will testify.

Time softened the edges. Rick Pitino, who was once Boeheim’s assistant coach and whose Providence team lost to Syracuse in the 1987 NCAA semifinals, introduced Boeheim to Juli Greene at a 1985 Final Four party in Lexington, Ky. They soon became a couple and then a married couple, and they run a foundation that raises money for children’s causes in central New York.

Juli is 20 years younger than Jim and is, shall we say, much more of a candidate to be on the cover of Vogue. ESPN’s Dick Vitale regularly delighted in showing a split-screen of the Boeheims and yelling, “Are you kidding me? This is like Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts!”

Although Boeheim had some graceless moments in press conferences this season, his acerbic nature has now morphed into quaint bluntness, at least for those whose thin is thicker than chiffon. He and Mike Krzyzewski became close friends, and Boeheim was a fixture on Coach K’s Olympic and Team USA staffs. They were in Argentina one day when a man approached Boeheim and told him how much he loved his coaching, and that he watches Syracuse regularly. The guy left and Boeheim turned to someone and said, “How do you like that? I got one (bleeping) fan and he lives 10,000 miles away.”

Some deep closets are being cleaned out, throughout college basketball. In the past two years Krzyzewski, Roy Williams, Wright and now Boeheim have handed over the chalk, all to former players or assistant coaches with minimal experience, and mixed results. Syracuse could use a reset, and maybe Autry is prepared for it, but at least he’ll have a sounding board nearby, if he can figure out which golf course Boeheim is conquering that day.

Boeheim certainly has the local knowledge. He showed up as a walk-on, 60 years ago. In one of his early practices, the man he was guarding scored on 20 consecutive plays. Boeheim called home (Lyons, N.Y., where his dad was a mortician) and said, “I’m not sure I’m ready for this.” He stuck with it and was a starter on a 1966 team that lost to Duke in the regional final.

The guy who tortured Boeheim in that practice was Dave Bing, who is still the most accomplished player in Syracuse history and became Boeheim’s backcourt partner and roommate. And Boeheim never went back to Lyons. Maybe he knew, even then, that Syracuse was his endless summer.