YARDLEY, Pa. — Frank Lyons props open a window to let in a little fresh air in the small upstairs dining room, and then stands on a chair to greet his guests. He is the proud proprietor of the Continental Tavern, a local watering hole and restaurant parked next to the only traffic light in this suburban Philadelphia borough. Frank is a self-described history buff, and his Tavern has quite a history, which he happily unspools from his perch. Revolutionary War soldiers, he explains, were bivouacked here during and after Washington’s fateful crossing of the Delaware River, which happened just five miles north. The basement of the building contains a five-foot wide tunnel which, historians confirmed, connected to a series of area tunnels, all part of the Underground Railroad. Consequently, Frank says with a grin, more than a few ghosts still call the place home.

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Finished detailing the old residents of the place, Frank giddily turns his attention to the current crowd, and one occupant in particular. Despite all of that history, the Continental does not usually serve dinner to a Hall of Fame coach. And yet there, at a table beside some of the restaurant’s framed artifacts, sits Rick Pitino. Sipping a three-olive martini and dressed casually in gray sweatpants, he has snuck in on a busy Saturday night nearly unnoticed.

The next afternoon his Iona basketball team, the MAAC regular-season title already clinched, will visit nearby Rider University, and as an Iona alum — Class of ‘71 — Frank has excitedly offered to host the team for dinner, converting the small private room upstairs into Gael central. Waitresses wear T-shirts commemorating Pitino’s recent 800th win, and on each table sits a logoed mat. This being Pitino, a random collection of glitterati have joined in — ex-Giants/Eagles punter Sean Landetta, who just so happens to live in town, and Maryland state Senator Ed Reilly, who does not but is a ‘72 grad.

It is a charming, homespun event: Lyons’ daughter/public relations director apologetically interrupting to snap pictures for the restaurant’s social media, while the players line up for heaping plates of food. It’s also about a million miles away from where Pitino was five years ago. In his heyday at Louisville, Pitino waltzed through the dining room at Jeff Ruby’s, the upscale downtown steak house, like a sultan. Friends and fans greeted him warmly as he made his way to his table, where waiters magically appeared at the ready, no wine glass left unfilled, and Alaskan king crab legs piled like stacks of firewood in the center of the table.

The path from there to here is a fairly straight line. During his tenure, Louisville hit for the scandal cycle — sex, strippers and undercover payments taking the program from the heights of national championship in 2013 to a dumpster fire that has yet to be altogether extinguished. The school is still awaiting penalties, as is Pitino, who was charged with a Level II failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance. He has long maintained his innocence, but Louisville ousted him anyway. That sort of stain does not allow for a man, even one with Pitino’s credentials, to have his choice of gigs.

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So that is what brings him here. But the question is why? Why, at 69 years old, with two national titles, seven Final Four appearances, and 54 NCAA Tournament wins, has  Pitino just disembarked from a two-hour bus ride to a cozy Bucks County tavern, in order to coach in a 1,600-seat gym the next day?

What is Rick Pitino chasing?

The deal was brokered at an Irish bar in Madrid after a break involving a Greek basketball team. Because with Pitino, there is always some sort of tale or caper to go along with even the most mundane of moments. Jim Boeheim, for example, did not merely hire Pitino as his assistant in 1975. He summoned Pitino to the lobby of the Americana Hotel in New York City on Pitino’s wedding night — and Pitino went — to close the deal.

In this case, Pitino and the Greek team he was coaching, Panathinaikos B.C., were playing a game in Madrid. Iona president Seamus Carey grew up practicing what he called “Pitino drills,” lessons derived while listening to the coach lecture during one of Jack Curran’s legendary summer camps. “Like all New York kids, I practiced on my own all the time,’’ says the Bronx-born Carey. “But after that, all I did was my Pitino drills.’’ Carey brought them with him to Vassar College, where he played ball, and later taught them to his own son, James. Carey watched from afar, as president at Transylvania University, while Pitino rebuilt Louisville. And as an athlete, he also knew what a viable sports program could do for a university.

Hired at Iona in 2019, Carey had big plans for the university. He’s since realized a number of them, including the acquisition of the 28 acres that once was Concordia College. It will house a new school of health sciences that will be funded largely by a $20 million donation from New York Presbyterian, and allow the university to spread its athletics footprint for varsity and club sports. Soon, the school will also be elevated from Iona College to The Iona University. The Gaels’ men’s basketball program has been good for years — 15 NCAA Tournament appearances, 11 league regular-season championships — but it hasn’t yet captured the magic that March can bring to a mid-major. Their only win in those 15 NCAA tries came in 1980, and that was vacated because star player (and future coach) Jeff Ruland had signed with an agent. “Lots of mid-majors make the tournament every year,” Carey says. “The ones that distinguish themselves are the ones that make a splash.’’ At the start of the 2019-20 season, longtime coach Tim Cluess took a leave of absence due to health reasons, a leave that turned permanent at the end of the season.

Carey knew Pitino’s good friend and business partner, Rick Avare, and asked if he thought Pitino might entertain the Iona job. By then, Carey says, he’d done his due diligence, knowing if he made the hire he’d take some heat. He dug into Louisville’s NCAA cases as best he could, and came away satisfied with the information. He knew of the coach’s other transgressions, if you will, but, “the central virtue of Catholicism is forgiveness,’’ he says, citing his own faith and Iona’s religious basis. “I don’t look at our faith as a platform to judge people. I thought Rick Pitino would be great for Iona, but I also believed Iona would be great for Rick Pitino.’’ Carey hopped a flight to Madrid, watched Pitino’s Greek team play and then met up with the coach to make his pitch at the only bar they could find open after midnight — the Irish pub. Carey laid out a dream of creating a Gonzaga of the East. Pitino tempered the enthusiasm a little bit, arguing perhaps to aim for Loyola Chicago since “what Gonzaga did takes more time than we have.’’ He also laid out what it would take in terms of investment and, most critically, the sort of non-conference schedule that would elevate the Gaels out of an impossible-to-win 15 or 16 seed, and into an upset-potential 12 seed.

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Carey didn’t blink and offered him the job. Pitino chewed on the offer for less than a night. He is a native New Yorker, with the hard Rs still to prove it. He still has an apartment in New York City, and is a member at Winged Foot Country Club, 10 minutes from Iona. He now has a house there, parked just behind the third hole. “If Iona was located anywhere other than where it’s located, I wouldn’t be interested,’’ Pitino says. “But I was going back home.’’

That explains the attraction of Iona, at least a portion of the why. But Pitino could have simply moved to Winged Foot and hit the links. Why not just fade to black, and improve the handicap?

Pitino knows what people think — that he is here to cleanse and resuscitate his career. This is his purgatory, a temporary stop where he atones for his past sins before rejoining the basketball heavens. His why, they believe, is equal parts narcissistic and desperate, a foolish hope that time and new success will help people forget what happened. Others have enjoyed such a rebirth. Houston coach Kelvin Sampson has been all but scrubbed clean from his repeat text messaging offenses at Oklahoma and Indiana, and before retirement Steve Fisher enjoyed a charmed second act at San Diego State, his Ed Martin/Michigan transgressions left as a footnote. Larry Brown has practically made a career by banking on people’s short-term memory losses.

But Pitino is not interested in absolution, nor is he restarting his climb up the coaching ladder. He has never been in this job to win popularity contests. In his first Big East coaches’ meeting Pitino, all of 33, practically came to blows with Rollie Massimino after the Villanova coach tried to cut the league’s underachievers out of a ball deal. And let’s face it. A man who had the temerity to coach both the Knicks and the Celtics, and Kentucky and Louisville, understands a portion of the population is forever going to be pissed off at you.

He cannot undo what’s been done. Eleven years after the Karen Sypher scandal, a pack of Rider students last week attempted to start a “15 seconds” chant during the game, referencing how long Pitino claimed to have sex with Sypher. His wounds are largely self-inflicted, so no one is going to play a violin for him. A married man chooses to have sex with a woman on a restaurant table. And while Pitino will not admit direct involvement in any of Louisville’s NCAA scandals, he does say the fault lies at his feet because he started hiring coaches who had relationships with recruits rather than connections with him. Some people believe that. Some don’t. “People who love me, love me. People who like me, like me,’’ Pitino says. “And the people who don’t? Nothing I do or say will change that, so why bother worrying about it? I’m done fighting those battles.”

He pauses to add a caveat. “I am going to fight anyone who lies,’’ he says. That has recently extended to Hanover Square Press, publisher of the book, “Black Market.” In the book, Merl Code alleges that Pitino was well aware of the decision to pay Brian Bowen, something Pitino has vehemently denied. “As a consultant with adidas, I did not act on my own, nor could I have done so,’’ Code writes. “I simply ran the proposition by my bosses, who did the same after consulting with Rick Pitino, and the answer that came back from up high was, ‘Rick wants our help. Get it done.’”

The (Louisville) Courier-Journal reported that Pitino and his attorney, Steven Stapleton, demanded a retraction and apology from the publishing house, accusing them of “disseminating false an otherwise baseless information.’’ The book was released on March 1.

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As for using Iona as a stepping stone, Pitino reiterates again and again that Iona is his final stop. He already had a chance to leave — last season he says he was offered three different jobs, including one in a location he’d love to call home. He turned them all down. But the more he wins, the more his name crops up. Whether he admits it or not, he enjoys it. A few years ago, blackballed and exiled, he was begging to get a job, any job. Now the rumor mill was churning that Pitino tops Maryland’s wish list. “They’re going to get a young, outstanding coach. It’s not going to be me,’’ Pitino says.

Carey is philosophical. He takes his head coach at his word and believes he’s happy where he is. “But I also understand that we’re all human,’’ he says. “If he did go, I’d understand. And we do have provisions in our contracts.” There was talk about a lifetime contract a few months ago, but no such deal has been signed. Pitino says it’s not necessary. “For someone who is 69 years old, this is a great way to go out. I’ve got no more mountains to climb. I have nothing left to prove.’’ He does, however, joke with his Gaels that only two coaches have taken three separate teams to the Final Four: him and John Calipari. “I want him off my resume,’’ he says with a chuckle.

There, right there, we get a glimpse of it — the why. “He can’t give this up,’’ Carey says. “It’s who he is.’’

With 11:43 left in the game and his team in the process of coughing up almost all of a 17-point lead, Pitino signals for a timeout. After his managers have neatly set up the chairs for the huddle, he turns his well-heeled heel to one and gives it a boot. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he seethes. He stares for a few split seconds while the chair is reset, flaps his coattails up (of course Pitino is still wearing a suit while the rest of the coaching profession has gone athleisure) and plops his derriere down, greeted by the wide-eyed stares of the scolded.

And so here we are, to the very meat of all of this. This is what Pitino is chasing, his why. It’s the same thing he’s been after all of his adult life. Essentially he is chasing himself, like a dog running after his tail. He wants the impossible — basketball perfection — and even when he gets close to it, summiting the top with a national title, he’s like that dog. He’s got it in his teeth. So now what do you do? You let go and chase it again.

Pitino is at Iona because he still wants to coach, still wants to chase basketball. He’s always known that. He got his first job in 1974, months after graduating from UMass, and despite being fired, banished, exiled and shamed, has spent all but 10 months of the past 48 years on a sideline. Along the way, he enjoyed the accouterments, the lifestyle and the attention, but he learned again and again — after a crash and burn with the Knicks, another with the Celtics and the immolation at Louisville — that none of it has any staying power. A man can go from sultan to pariah pretty quickly and banners that go up can, in fact, come down.

When that’s all stripped away, what’s left? Coaching, and a man with his own brass rings to reach for. He is not here to return to some humble beginnings or to go back to his roots. Iona needed a coach and asked if he would be interested. It is as simple as that. He would be doing the same thing if UNLV or someone else snagged him first.

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Sure, the other stuff, the comparisons between his penthouse basketball world to his new digs can and has been comical. In Greece, Pitino’s coaching locker room had a toilet but no seat. “You could go number one, but not number two,’’ he says. Upon winning the Greek Basket League, he got a seat. The visiting locker room at Rider barely is wide enough to fit four seats across, and at Niagara, 15 guys had to figure out how to clean up postgame with just two showers.

But basketball is basketball. And no matter what accusations or insults people have hurled at Pitino, none have said he cannot coach this sport. “Ten points,’’ Monmouth coach King Rice says. “He walks out and he is 10 points right there. I look down the bench, and their whole team knows what we’re doing, so now you gotta bring your team together and whisper in their ear, because they know what you’re doing before you even do it. I called a zone play. I didn’t even say it out loud, and they knew. That’s what this man does.’’ Not everyone in the MAAC is thrilled about it. Pitino can get players because of who he is — his current roster includes a Louisville transfer (Quinn Slazinski), Tulsa transfer (Elijah Joiner) and SMU transfer (Tyson Jolly), and a star-in-the-making sophomore from Nigeria (Nelly Junior Joseph) who took a flier on the school because ex-Card star Gorgui Dieng told him to. “But then he also knows how to coach them,’’ one MAAC administrator says. Fans at other league schools are wondering why they can’t go out themselves a Pitino, too. (Iona is paying Pitino $1 million. That might be partially why.)

In two years in the league, Pitino is 23-6. COVID-19 pauses rendered the Gaels, who played but nine MAAC games last year, a ninth seed in the conference tournament. They still won four games in five days to claim the championship and automatic bid and then gave second-seeded Alabama a tussle in the first round.

His roster dotted with transfers, the Gaels are 16-2 in league play and enter the tournament as the favorite. He has scheduled the way he believes they need in order to elevate their seed — Iona beat Alabama, played Kansas and would have played Seton Hall were it not for the coronavirus — and their NET ranking (85th) is high enough that The Athletic bracketologist Brian Bennett has them as a No. 13 seed to start conference tournament week. But Pitino also knows there is very little wiggle room, and if the step down in league rankings is supposed to ease the pressure, no one told him. “It’s actually worse,’’ he says. “At Louisville, or Kentucky, usually you know you’re in. Here, you have no margin for error.’’ This is in part why he coaches as if every possession might be the end of him. But only in part. The rest is just how he is.

On the scorer’s table next to his seat, along with a can of Phocus (caffeinated sparkling water made by a Louisville buddy that Pitino drinks like real water — “and then I’m up all night’’), Pitino keeps a collection of cough drops. He does not stop talking. “Elijah, E-li-JAH,’’ he yells at Joiner at least a dozen times. He screeches to Jolly to move on defense, chides Dylan Van Eyck for not shooting, stomps his foot to get players’ attention, calls out opposing plays (Rice is not wrong), occasionally curses and frequently seethes. Never mind that the Gaels already have clinched the regular season crown. “All season long, coach prepares us for March,’’ Van Eyck says. “Sometimes he’s not satisfied even when we win. He’ll tell us, ‘Yeah, that’s good enough in November, but it doesn’t cut it in March.’’’

The players admit Pitino’s incessant demanding and grasp of the game took some getting used to. There were times they felt like they were drowning in information overload, trying to keep up with everything he was teaching, unaccustomed to someone so exacting over details. “People told me early on, ‘Don’t try to fight him,’’’ Jolly says. “I’ve been to other schools, learned different things and I’ve got different habits. But I just decided to fight my habits, listen and understand more than give my opinion.’’ During the game against Rider, Pitino harped on Jolly about a missed defensive assignment. The guard at first started to argue, “I did,’’ he said. And then he stopped.

Despite squandering the big lead, Iona holds on for the 67-61 win. Pitino does not rail in the cramped locker room afterward. The cinderblock walls retain their paint. But he does find a bone of contention — the Gaels were just 12 of 18 on the free-throw line, a game after going 11 of 20 against Canisius. “How do you hold a baby?” he asks them. “You don’t clench it. You hold it delicately. That’s the same as a free throw. You can put the baby to sleep on the line, but you have to relax.’’

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He is not taking his own advice. He will go home, he knows, and stew over those misses. “We’ve got a team that can win it,’’ he says. “But we can lose one of these games, too, because of our free-throw shooting. We’re awful, and that scares the shit out of me. That will keep me up all night.’’ Pitino shakes his head at himself. “See?’’ he says. “Nothing has changed.’’

Which is, of course, exactly the way he wants it. What is Rick Pitino chasing? The same thing he’s always chased — his own elusive quest for perfection.

(Top photo: John Jones / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)