There is a Godard movie that closes with the caption, “End of film. End of cinema.”; even by French standards, it’s awesomely pretentious. Friends and I became obsessed with it and tried to adopt it into our daily conversation whenever possible. (“End of sandwich. End of lunch.”) With Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari finally winning his first national title, it seems worth reviving this grammatical construct, for surely Calipari’s ultimate triumph has signaled the point when players ceased being “student-athletes” and officially became “teenagers killing time before declaring for the NBA draft.”

College basketball has always been a scummy, scummy sport. UCLA’s John Wooden is the most successful and respected coach in the game’s history. Yet someone once declared, “If the UCLA teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s were subjected to the kind of scrutiny Jerry Tarkanian and his players have been, UCLA would probably have to forfeit about eight national titles and be on probation for the next 100 years.” What douche bag was tarnishing the legacy of Saint Wooden? His own star center, Hall of Famer Bill Walton, who was alluding to the huge amounts of money that booster Sam Gilbert illegally funneled to players. (It should be noted this was intended as a criticism of the NCAA, not his former mentor; anyone who’s listened to Walton call a game knows he can’t so much as sneeze without talking for 20 minutes about how Wooden’s Pyramid of Success teaches proper snot-wiping technique.)

This is college basketball at its best.

Nevertheless, I think something’s been lost from the days when college players were expected to stay four years and through red-shirting careers could last even longer – I felt like Alonzo Mourning attended Georgetown for at least a decade. There was one stage in my childhood when I wound up at a new school each year for four straight years, with a move from Nevada to New Jersey in the middle.

The one constant in my life: Stacey Augmon was a starting forward for the UNLV Runnin’ Rebels the whole time.

Then young players decided, “I want to openly draw a huge salary now.” And more and more left as sophomores and freshman and finally skipped college altogether. Needless to say, turning their backs on their educations proved to be a horrendous decision, which is why when you hear the name “LeBron James”, you think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Yes, an impressively high percentage of the kids skipping college became superstars (notably MVPs LeBron, Kevin Garnett, and Kobe Bryant). Even most of the ones who basketball-wise were complete disasters did okay for themselves in other ways. Kwame Brown is arguably the worst number one overall draft pick ever – his selection marked the moment Michael Jordan learned being a great player and finding a great player are different skill sets – but he’s managed to stay in the NBA for 13 seasons and counting. A lot of people regret missing out on college; few of them have earned $50 million while pursuing that tragic error.

Of course, there were losers in this scenario. Projecting player development is always tricky; it’s particularly treacherous when the future of your franchise has the emotional maturity of a 17-year-old because he’s, er, 17, while the NCAA couldn’t help wondering, “Why would King James want to play for a pro team for millions… when he could play for one of ours for considerably less than that?”

And kids need to attend lectures and seminars and have a transitional step between youth and adulthood and those nights spent staying up all night talking with the guys in your dorm about the meaning of life are worth more than blah blah blah.

Thus the NBA took action: they implemented a rookie salary cap, ensuring that when GMs made moron draft picks, they would be reasonably priced.

Also, they said kids had to go to college for an entire year (or play in Europe, in which case it’s a study abroad thing).

And they assumed that once kids got to college, they would love it so much they would want to stay, or least they’d be pressured to stick around since the elite coaches would avoid the one-and-dones, because by the time those players understood what they were doing, they would be gone.

Then it was felt that a coach could make one-and-dones work if they limited themselves to one of them while building an otherwise conventional team, like Syracuse did with the freshman Carmelo Anthony when they won a national championship in 2003 before he turned pro.

Now John Calipari has shown that you can build an entire program out of them, with the result there is no longer even a pretense of caring about that Geology 101 midterm.

Presumably, one day the college requirement will be lowered to the point that players will only need to put in a semester of college (they’ll miss part of the season, but who gives a crap about those beginning of the year Maui Invitational type-deals), or maybe only a single month, so the stars can show up just in time for the conference championship and then bail out right after the Final Four.

I could put up with all this if not for one thing: the basketball’s lousy. I have no problem with owners and athletes being greedy and hypocritical – I’m a Yankee fan – but in exchange for discarding my moral compass I expect serious entertainment value. This year’s Kentucky team was amazingly talented. The players are unselfish and they play hard consistently.

Yet when Larry Brown asserted that they could defeat 15 NBA teams, I couldn’t help but think, “That’s impressive, because in the SEC tournament they couldn’t beat frickin’ Vanderbilt.”

I could see the Wildcats maturing into an unbeatable team in a year or two. That won’t happen, of course, because all the stars will be gone and there’s a chance Calipari will go too, as this is his third college job (there was also a stop in the pros, though at that point in their history it was a stretch to describe the New Jersey Nets that way). Likewise, North Carolina would be great if a quarter of their hadn’t just declared for the draft, and if Duke’s freshman sensation Austin Rivers sticks around another year I think Coach K and the Blue Devils have a very realistic shot at the second round.

I will happily fill in my bracket come March every year and may even catch some of the tournament, but I will never again tune in on a regular basis; I have little or no interest watching a group of players still learning to play together (and often play the game itself) who are already eying the door. I suspect many Americans feel the same way, based on the fact coverage of the free agency courtship of Peyton Manning – which consisted mostly of footage of Peyton in a suit wandering through airports – drew as much attention as actual basketball games.

Of course, there is a potential happy ending: none of this may have happened.

Allow me to explain. Or rather, allow slate.com’s Josh Levin to explain on my behalf.

“Calipari isn’t a cheater, officially. When UMass was stripped of its 1996 Final Four appearance due to Marcus Camby’s taste for agent-provided cash and prostitutes, Calipari wasn’t implicated. And when Memphis’ 38-win 2008 season was wiped from history due to allegations that someone who wasn’t Derrick Rose took Derrick Rose’s SAT, Calipari—who had already shipped off to Kentucky—dodged the NCAA’s bullets again. ‘This is awe-inspiring,’ Charlie Pierce wrote in Slate two years ago. ‘Two schools, at different times and in different places, both with their greatest seasons erased from the record books, and both of them coached by the same guy.’”

So there’s a very real chance that in a few years John Calipari will be coaching somewhere else and we’ll discover Kentucky’s title run never actually occurred.

In which case Lexington shall weep (as opposed to during their victory celebration, when they were mostly screaming from gunshot wounds), and Godard will be very amused by it all, as he’s a Louisville fan.

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