The Lakers can probably count themselves lucky that Mike Krzyzewski didn’t take them up on the offer to coach Team Dysfunction. But the real winners in this are college basketball, its fans and Duke University.

The Lakers will get along without Coack K on the sideline, and they’ll probably get along better without him than they would have with him. But if he had gone the way of so many before him and jumped like a porpoise for a herring at the $40 million L.A. was dangling in front of his beak, the college game would have taken a devastating hit.

It wouldn’t have been just about losing the game’s premier name – sorry, Bobby Knight fans, but your guy, legendary as he is, has long since been eclipsed by the ultimate Dukie. Someone else would have come along to take Krzysewski’s place at the top of the collegiate heap.

Rather, if Coach K had gone to the Lakers, it would have cheapened the value of college coaching as a career. If the biggest name in the business had decided there was a better, more worthy and more meaningful level to go to, then everyone else coaching college ball would be on the same level as a minor league baseball manager. They would have been talented guys trying to get to the big leagues.

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By staying at Duke and turning down $8 million a year, Krzyzewski said as emphatically as possible that the job he has is the best job he can get. He said that coaching college kids, even if they come for a year or two and leave, has more intrinsic value than trying to get NBA players to do what you tell them to do. He said that education is important, that a college can be as big a franchise as a city.

Most important, Krzyzewski said money isn’t everything. He said there is a point at which a bigger paycheck doesn’t justify tearing apart your life, leaving a place you’ve loved for nearly a quarter century and come to think of as your own, and moving to a land of bigger headlines and more camera crews. He said that personal satisfaction and a sense of belonging has a value that can’t be measured in digits to the left of a decimal point.

Twenty-four years. That’s how long Coach K has been wearing out the finish on the sidelines in Durham. If he wants to coach until he’s in his 80s, he can double that. No college president will ever fire him. No serious columnist will ever call for his head. No one will joke if he gives his players books to read.

He has won three championships and had good shots at probably a dozen more. In this era of parity in the college game and players who seldom stay their allotted four years, that’s awfully good.

But beyond the titles and the great teams are the intangibles that Krzyzewski brings to college basketball. He has been a beacon of integrity and honor, a man who gets good kids and helps them become good men. He has done things right, operating a program at the very highest level at an institution that cuts no academic corners. He has been what all coaches should be: a teacher, a man who makes people better.

In that, he is the John Wooden of our times. He’ll never win the titles that Wooden did; no one will. Those days are gone forever. But he carries the mantle of Wooden, the exemplar of what a coach should be.

Had he left, all that would have been forgotten. From being the most important man in the program, he would have become the guy who has to make Kobe Bryant happy and beg and wheedle everybody else to maybe pay a little bit of attention to the program. He could never have been in the pros what he was in college. Phil Jackson, who would like us all to admit that he’s the best pro coach ever, couldn’t get through to this year’s Lakers. No college-boy coach was going to do it, either.

In staying at Duke, Krzyzewski acknowledged that being a college coach is an end in itself, and that taking a shot at the pros could not make his life better. It may have made him more famous, but it wouldn’t have made him a better person.

And that’s great for anyone who loves sports. Even a Lakers fan should be able to appreciate what he’s done and be grateful for it. Duke fans, of course, will be ecstatic, but North Carolina fans should be happy, as well.

Krzyzewski took a weekend to think it over, which means the temptation was there. He wouldn’t be human if he had rejected out of hand all that money and the enormous ego trip that goes along with it.

The fact he rejected it sets him above nearly everyone else. He’s at the top of his game, and his game is college ball, not pro ball. It’s where he became what he is. It’s where he will now stay for as long as he wants.

It’s a great day for everyone.

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