A few minutes before then-Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden concluded his final postgame press conference and walked offstage arm-in-arm with wife Ann, a reporter asked him about the future.
Bowden, who had just capped his career with a Gator Bowl win over his former team, West Virginia, said, "I've got to learn how to retire."
Considering how life has been since Bowden coached that final game in Jacksonville, Florida, on Jan. 1, 2010, he still needs some work learning what "retirement" is.
Bowden, who turns 87 on Nov. 8, was in Charleston on Thursday as the keynote speaker at the University of Charleston's Nexus of Leadership Conference. He'll average about two speaking engagements a week these days.
"Whenever they ask me to speak, I do," Bowden said. "Some weeks, I'll have none. Some weeks, I'll have five."
He speaks before a number of different groups - football teams, leadership conferences, business organizations. His favorites, though, are his talks at churches and Fellowship of Christian Athletes gatherings. A devout Christian, Bowden said that strong faith puts those speaking engagements in a special place in his heart.
"That, and these young kids are not getting it like they used to," Bowden said. "When I was young, I had a mother and a father that drug me to church, every Sunday morning. When you get to my age, you appreciate it."
He's also learned to appreciate the slower pace of life now that his coaching career has concluded. It might not seem slower to the outsider, the travel to and from speaking engagements all over the country and the visits to lands like Israel, Iraq and Europe. But it's vastly different than the constantly chaotic world of college football.
Bowden says every day feels like Saturday morning. When his coaching days were done, he realized there were no more early-morning film studies or workouts. No more heading out onto the recruiting trail to woo superstar prospects. No more worries about a 2 a.m. phone call from the Tallahassee Police Department.
"All of a sudden, it was like a big weight was lifted off my shoulders," Bowden said. "And I was like, 'Golly, it's hard to believe I was under that much pressure and didn't even know it.' And that's true to all coaches.
"A lot of times, I'll lecture to coaches and I'll say, 'Y'all don't know what pressure you're under.' Once you get out of it, you begin to realize."
Bowden spent 57 straight years coaching college football as either an assistant or a head coach. His greatest fame came from 1976 to 2009, when he turned Florida State from a Sunshine State also-ran into a gridiron juggernaut, a national brand and a two-time national champion. Directly before that, he stood at the helm of WVU's football team. He spent four seasons in Morgantown as an assistant coach and six as head coach, winning 42 games and taking the Mountaineers to a pair of Peach Bowls.
He credits his tenure at West Virginia as the foundation for his runaway success at FSU.
"I made so many mistakes [at WVU]," Bowden said. "I didn't make them at Florida State. I've apologized in Morgantown a lot of times to the people for the lousy job I did learning how to coach. When I got to Florida State, I had learned what not to do. So West Virginia served as an educating tool for me."
It also helped him grow as a leader. When he thinks of effective leadership qualities, the first thing that comes to his mind is to be someone who leads by actions as much as words.
"Set an example," Bowden said. "Don't tell them to do it if you're not going to do it. When I first started coaching it was, 'Don't do what I do, but do what I say.' That won't work nowadays."
Just because Bowden is out of coaching doesn't mean he's lost interest in college football. He says he watches "every dad-gum game" and that the on-field product has never been better. He does see that it has changed, including in terms of access. When he coached, his preseason practices were open. Sports writers could sit on the upper level of the FSU baseball stadium and watch entire sessions. On Sundays, players who went in for treatment often stopped by the media gaggle to talk.
Now, those windows into college programs are closing. Some head coaches don't even permit assistants to talk to the media.
"That's not the way I did it, not that they're wrong," Bowden said. "But it's entirely different. I wanted my people to learn to talk to the press. I felt that was part of coaching. If you can't talk to the press, son, you ain't gonna make it."
He's happy to see that his sons have made it in college coaching. He never steered them into the profession, but they've thrived. Tommy won 90 games and three conference coach of the year awards at Tulane and Clemson. Terry has 163 career college victories, including an undefeated season at Auburn. He currently is Akron's head coach, led the Zips to eight wins and their first bowl victory last season and has the team at 4-2 this year, including a 65-38 win at Marshall.
Jeff, the former FSU offensive coordinator, is on Terry's staff as receivers coach and special teams coordinator. The Bowden coaching bug has even bitten the next generation. Jeff's son, Hunter, is an offensive graduate assistant at Akron.
Bowden's joy is reserved for his family. His myriad accomplishments - two national titles, 12 Atlantic Coast Conference titles, 14 straight seasons finishing in the top five of the Associated Press and coaches top 25 polls - are wonderful memories, but not memories he hearkens back to often.
"I don't look back," he said. "I don't interest me at all, because it's gone. It's kind of fun when somebody brings it up. But as far as me going back and saying, 'Oh, look what we did,' no interest in that whatsoever. Everything to me is future. Future, future, future.
"I'm so happy with what happened," he added. "I think maybe I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I couldn't have planned my moves better than it happened. I thank the man upstairs."
Contact Derek Redd at 304-348-1712 or derek.redd@wvgazettemail.com. Follow him on Twitter @derekredd.