This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Nov. 26 One Day One Game issue. Subscribe today!

THERE'S A STRANGE HUM in Les Miles' living room, like a storm muffled by a window, a mix of a buzz and a howl. Sitting on his couch, he looks around, over at the fridge, up at the air conditioner. He raises his hands in the air.

"What's that noise?" he finally asks.

The answer hits me first and I blurt it out, "It's Tuscaloosa." The drone is coming from the big flat screen television, where Alabama is dismantling previously undefeated Mississippi State, a week before the Crimson Tide come to Baton Rouge. The roar of Bryant-Denny Stadium is overloading the field mics, running through snaked lengths of cable to the broadcast truck, up to a satellite, then back down into Les Miles' living room. Every so often, there's a shriek: "Roll Tide Roll!"

Otherwise, the house is silent. Nobody says much. Normally when Miles watches football, which happens only during LSU's bye week, he's hilarious, jumping up and stomping toward the television to scream at officials, throwing an imaginary flag or yelling at fellow coaches to go for it on fourth down. As Bob Stoops rants at a ref on this rare free Saturday, Miles grins and says, "Give 'em hell, Bob!" Just before the kickoff of the Alabama game, he did frenzied circles in the kitchen, opening the freezer, drawers, looking through the pantry and bellowing in his Coach Voice: "I know there's candy around here somewhere. Where is the Halloween candy!?"

But with the Crimson Tide on, he's quiet. The room feels heavy with his concentration. Miles focuses. His wife, Kathy, curls next to him under a blanket and doesn't say much either. It's startling to watch him fade from the room. He's leaving the bye week behind, leaving 11 months behind, losing himself to the task ahead. It's clear from the first few minutes of the broadcast that Alabama will win and that no obstacles remain between the Tide and the Tigers. The lurking hope and doubt leave the shadow world of Miles' imagination and become, at long last, real. The last time they played hums in his head like the crowd noise in his living room.

He doesn't say anything when he stands up, walking to the dining room table, sitting by the bank of windows overlooking the pool. He takes a big purple binder out of his briefcase. He uncaps a pen and begins to make notes.

I DROVE TO Baton Rouge two weeks before the rematch of the 2012 BCS championship, wondering how many times in the past few years LSU has faced the crucible of a highly ranked opponent. It seems as though Les Miles coaches one enormous game after another, each hyped as the biggest of his life, a pressure grinder until it ends, when only the next one matters. Big games have a half-life of nothing and I've thought a lot about what kind of person can live like that, what the constant rise and fall does to them. Before heading to the football ops building, I stopped at the LSU sports information office to look up the numbers. By January, Miles will have coached against 51 ranked teams in eight seasons. Since winning the national championship in 2007, LSU has played 10 top-five opponents. The Crimson Tide will make 11. Six of those games have been against Alabama. A few minutes later, I run into Kathy Miles in the football parking lot. I read her the list of top-five opponents: "1, 1, 3, 5, 5, 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 1." She looked stunned and, sounding a little in awe, asked, "We played all those people?"

MILES IS A MAN of such eccentric and exaggerated quirks that by the time he reaches the public imagination, all that's left of him are those bits of weirdness: the grass-eating, the odd way he claps and wears his hat, the dueling adjectives of guts and insanity that follow his play-calling like puppies fighting over a wounded bird. So it's strange, even a little jarring, to hear him being introspective and thoughtful. He is talking about wounds and scars, which are never far from his mind as he prepares for this year's Alabama game. It's the bye week. He heads through the second floor hall past the receptionist's desk, down the stairs into the two-story trophy room where his voice echoes off the high ceilings and glass walls. It's dark outside.

"Any lesson learned is a scar," he says. "Any open sore is a wound. You want to show your scars. Be proud of the lessons learned."

"What is the loss in the BCS championship game?" I ask.

"Both," he says.

In the Superdome last January, Miles and his Tigers came out in the biggest game of their lives and did not fire. Alabama won 21-0, and in the process took something even more precious than a national title. The Crimson Tide made LSU look structurally inferior, made Nick Saban seem able to find answers to questions that Miles didn't know to ask. That night, Miles and his family left the Superdome together, riding toward Canal Street in a police cruiser, the coach in the front with the cop, the four kids and Kathy crammed into the back. Months later, Kathy would feel proud at how the family comforted their hollowed-out dad. They all piled into the hotel room bed and tried to convince him that it would be OK.

It was still a good season, Dad.

You won 13 games, honey.

The loss was a wound, not just to an undefeated season but to the identity of coaches who see themselves as people who win big games. The first step in healing was to watch the film for the first time. As Miles took notes the day after the loss, a huge, existential failure became many small, practical ones. He broke the game down position by position. A problem identified could be fixed, a lesson learned, the wound becoming a scar.

Without these problems, the national championship game might have ended differently. "Two mistakes by running backs in protection, I'm not kidding you now," he tells me almost a year later, snapping his fingers, "we're gonna hit big-ass plays."

His voice lowers.

"Not one time in the game did we get momentum on our side," he says.

The problems and their solutions wait in a folder for the first Saturday in November. Each game brings them closer to the rematch, and when the clock hits zero at Texas A&M on Oct. 20, a shaky 24-19 LSU win, Miles' mind quickly turns to Alabama. "Well I promise you, it was certainly before I got to the locker room," he says later. "Oh, I guarantee it."

The next day Miles stays at work past midnight, later than usual on the Sunday after a game, watching film of this year's Crimson Tide -- and more film of the BCS defeat. A few places to attack emerge, a way to run on Alabama's stout defense, through it even, and a way for struggling quarterback Zach Mettenberger to find himself. The next morning Miles gathers the staff in the conference room next to his office, which overlooks the practice field. He...