KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- Bruce Pearl elevated Tennessee basketball to unprecedented heights during his six electrifying seasons as the Vols' pied piper of hoops.
As shrewd a showman as he was a coach, Pearl went to the NCAA tournament every year, including three Sweet 16 trips and the school's first-ever Elite Eight appearance, and even took the Vols to a No. 1 ranking in the polls for a week during the 2007-08 season.
But just like that, he was gone, fired after lying to NCAA investigators about a cookout at his home that was attended by recruits and subsequently shackled with a three-year show-cause penalty.
Tennessee fans were distraught, and many of them are still bitter to this day, that something so good could end so badly, especially when Pearl's transgressions didn't involve either one of the NCAA's supposed no-no's -- money changing hands or academic fraud.
In what's sure to be a surreal setting, it all comes full circle on Saturday when Pearl returns to Thompson-Boling Arena on the "other" bench to lead his Auburn team against Tennessee (noon ET, ESPN2 & WatchESPN.com).
He's not sure what kind of reception he'll receive, but insists the good memories for him far outweigh the bad.
"It was a special time and a very rare run," Pearl told ESPN.com this week. "Tremendous things happened in that building for me and my family, from Chris Lofton hitting that 3-pointer from the hash mark over Kevin Durant when we beat Texas, to my children's high school graduations and college graduations, to me and [wife] Brandy hosting "An Evening in Orange" and raising $1 million for the Cancer Institute at UT Medical Center."
That fundraiser, by the way, was held a month after Pearl was fired, further proof that he left a little piece of himself on Rocky Top. In fact, he and Brandy are scheduled to help with another charity event Friday night in Knoxville to benefit children with multiple handicaps.
"Just because you leave doesn't mean you forget," Pearl said. "We still have a lot of family and friends in Knoxville, a lot of people who supported us, and we still stay in touch. But I live in Auburn now, have a home in Auburn, and Auburn is home.
"I'm an Auburn man. There's no confusion there."
Pearl remained in Knoxville during his hiatus from coaching. He worked as vice president of marketing for the H.T. Hackney Company, a Knoxville-based wholesale distributor for convenience stores, and also worked at ESPN as a television analyst.
"Even though you're not coaching basketball, you still have a responsibility to your family," Pearl said. "Because I had let them down and publicly embarrassed them, I had to find ways to take care of them. I'm not very talented, so I have to be passionate about what I'm doing to be effective. I've got to be all-in, and that's the way I treated both of those jobs."
Pearl said he never had any visions of returning to Tennessee as coach after his show cause expired. He also said that the fan-driven petition to bring him back during Cuonzo Martin's final season was misguided.
"The leadership that fired me didn't want me back," Pearl said. "And, really, I don't think that would have been a good move for anybody. I'd moved on by then. The reason I stayed in Knoxville was because that's where my home was then. My kids were there, and they were in school there.
"I made several statements asking fans not to participate [in the petition] and that it wasn't fair to the coaches or student-athletes who were there. Either way, it wouldn't have been the right move. What we did was special and will live forever as a part of Tennessee basketball, but it's history."
Pearl, who declined to get into the specifics of his firing, did say that the decision to fire him went over former Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton's head. Hamilton ended up resigning about three months after Pearl was fired.
"In my opinion, Mike Hamilton did everything he could to save me," Pearl said. "He didn't fire me. I won't say who it was, at least not now, but it wasn't Mike."
Jimmy Cheek, who's still Tennessee's chancellor, was outspokenly in Pearl's corner right after Pearl's emotional press conference prior to his final season in 2010-11 when he came clean about lying to the NCAA.
But sources told ESPN.com that key board of trustee members pushed to fire Pearl after it was learned that an additional illegal contact (violation of the bump rule) was included in the notice of allegations.
"What I will say publicly is that I was very disappointed with the process," Pearl said. "I made the mistake and admitted to it and felt like we'd made it through the worst of it, and then when I was very vulnerable, the NCAA charged me with another violation [the illegal bump of former UCLA player Jordan Adams] that the committee ultimately deemed wasn't a major violation.
"I told the leadership at Tennessee that it wasn't a violation. But by that time, the damage had already been done."
Seeing Pearl on the Auburn bench Saturday at a place he turned into a men's hoops wonderland for the Vols will be strange for his former players and the Tennessee fans, many of whom remain indebted to him for what he did for the program.
"I think this game might give a little bit of closure to the whole situation. I hope it does," said Dane Bradshaw, a co-captain on Pearl's 2006-07 Tennessee team and now an analyst for the SEC Network.
"I know, to some people, that may sound strange, that it's been four years or whatever and it's still not closed. He's done some fundraising there, but he hasn't been in front of 20,000-plus fans who cheered so hard for him for six years. It's the first time everybody's been in that arena together. This will be different."
Earl and Judy Brown are Tennessee fans to the core and as loyal as the day is long. Judy attended all but seven games that Pearl coached in at Tennessee (both home and away), and she missed two of the seven because she was in the hospital.
"Bruce deserves an applause because he brought Tennessee basketball back," Judy said. "It will be hard. We'll go over and shake his hand and [assistant] Tony Jones' hand."
She then paused, started to say something else and chuckled.
"You hate to cream them, but I hope we do," she said.
Earl was in the Atlanta airport recently and dragging with the flu. He heard this familiar voice behind him bellowing, "Get your head up, Mr. Brown."
It was Pearl, and they talked for nearly 10 minutes.
"I told him we wished him well, but certainly not well enough to beat the Vols," Earl quipped. "We like Bruce and still like Bruce, but we're not Bruce fans and not Cuonzo fans. We're Tennessee Vol fans and behind Donnie Tyndall and this team 100 percent."
Bradshaw, who travels around to work different games and interacts with different coaches as part of his SEC Network duties, has an even greater appreciation now for Pearl.
"You realize what a great package he was, great recruiter, great X's and O's guy, great marketer, great with the media and great with the fans," Bradshaw said. "It's so hard to find a coach who can do it all, and Bruce can do it all.
"I enjoyed being a part of those first two teams and building an era that you felt like was going to last a long time. Even though we didn't get to the Final Four, you felt like you were the building block that would do that, and then when Tennessee had to hit the reset button when Bruce was fired, it's something we all had a hard time wrapping our hands around.
"I'm just glad to see him back on the sidelines. He's good for basketball no matter what team you're rooting for."
And while the memories will undoubtedly flow for Pearl on Saturday, his focus is clearly his Auburn basketball team and finding a way to end a drought that has seen the Tigers lose four of their last five games.
That doesn't mean he won't reminisce. After all, it was a little more than eight years ago that he and some of his players painted up their chests and went shirt-less to support the Lady Vols in a game at Thompson-Boling Arena.
His self-deprecating humor as sharp as ever, Pearl cracked, "That was a bad look then and an even worse look now."