The thrill of competition is intoxicating. The roar of the crowd. The wins. The championships. The fame. The adulation. The incredible money ...

But none of those things is why the truly great coaches get into college athletics. When their time is done in their sport, they won't remember how many games they won or how much money they made. They will remember their relationships with their players. They will remember those until the day they die.

Occasionally, those of us on the outside get a glimpse of just how meaningful those relationships are. When it happens, we're almost reluctant to peek. It's as if we're violating something so sacred, so deep, so pure. But we look anyway. We can't help but look. When we do, we're left with an image that is burned into our memory. We're better because of it, because of the realization that one human being can care so passionately about another in a strictly fraternal way.

So it was at the Final Four in Indianapolis last weekend.

Years after we have forgotten that Duke beat Butler to win the national championship, we'll remember the moment shared by West Virginia coach Bob Huggins and star player Da'Sean Butler.

It happened after Butler collapsed to the floor with nine minutes left in the national semifinal game against Duke, clutching his left knee, writhing in unbearable pain from a torn ACL. West Virginia was losing, 63-48. Its remarkable season was over. So, too, Butler feared, was his NBA future.

The kid was inconsolable.

Huggins was worse.

It was as if his flesh and blood were on the court.

Of course, it was that way.

Butler was a holdover from the John Beilein era, when Huggins took over as West Virginia coach after the 2006-07 season. Butler didn't just buy into the Huggins way, which has roster spots only for the tough and tough-minded. He became a star, leading the Mountaineers to the NCAA tournament as a sophomore and junior and all the way to the Final Four as a senior.

He finished his career as the third-leading scorer in school history behind a couple of legends, Jerry West and Hot Rod Hundley.

"If you can be too good of a guy, he's too good of a guy," Huggins has said of Butler.

Now, Butler was hurting.

All coaches share that kind of pain with their players. I think back to the 2000 college football season, when Penn State freshman cornerback Adam Taliaferro made a tackle in a game at Ohio State and didn't get up, his neck fractured, his body feared paralyzed.

"The first time I ever saw my father cry was when his mother died. Then there was the time Adam got hurt," Penn State quarterbacks coach Jay Paterno told Sports Illustrated last year.

Joe Paterno was so upset that he thought for a long time about giving up football. The wins, the fame and the money didn't seem worth that kind of agony. It's fair to think it wasn't until after Taliaferro walked again -- against all odds -- and graduated from Rutgers School of Law that football became fun again for Joe Paterno.

Relationships.

Losing his best shot at a national title wasn't on Huggins' mind when he went to comfort the terrified Butler. He got down on his knees and bent over to cradle Butler's head in both hands. He caressed a cheek -- his nose no more than an inch from Butler's -- and spoke in a calming voice. He told the sobbing Butler that he was going to be OK, that he shouldn't feel as if he let the team down by getting hurt, that everyone on the squad knew he had given everything he had and that there was nothing left to give.

"He told me he loved me and that I was a special kid," Butler told CBS Sports two days later.

Surely, there have been better moments in sports.

Darned if I can think of one, though.

I've often wondered why Huggins' players are so devoted to him. He is a terrific coach, to be sure.

"I don't think there are five coaches in the country better than him," said West, who went on after his West Virginia days to become an NBA legend as a player and general manager. "He's equal to any of them." But Huggins' style isn't for everyone. He is so demanding, almost to the point of being abusive. "The players get a pair of sneakers and a hard time," he said at the Final Four of his approach to coaching.

During a game at Pitt in 2008, Huggins ordered star Joe Alexander to the bench, loudly calling him -- this is the sanitized version -- "a piece of garbage." When Alexander was asked about it at the Big East Conference tournament a month later, he shrugged and said, "He does it because he cares about us. He wants all of us to be better." Two months after that, he was drafted No. 8 in the first round of the NBA draft by the Milwaukee Bucks and signed a contract that guaranteed him $4.15 million in the first two seasons.

I'm guessing Alexander called Huggins to thank him.

One day, Butler will do the same.

"He's more than a basketball coach," West said of Huggins. "Those kids love him."

Certainly, the sports world saw a softer, gentler side of the rough, gruff Huggins that night in Indianapolis.

I'll never look at him the same way again.

Will you?