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With the loss of its final basketball game, the Lobos men's basketball team closed the Ritchie McKay era after a five-year run.

Not that I witnessed any of the games live or could even tell you with any confidence the names of any players. I'm just not into college sports.

What I was into from the day of McKay's hiring as coach was watching how friends, strangers and anyone else in this community considered a black person in a position of being the face of a Southwestern city and its home of higher learning - a city with a black population just a tick more than 3 percent.

And that black person was being paid rather astoundingly for that privilege. We'll wrestle that bit of nonsense to the ground in a second.

This whole coach-as-the-unofficially-visual spokesman has always been kind of fascinating to me. For a lot of people in far-flung parts of the country, a coach of the basketball team is their point of entry for that institution. The kids on the team are one thing, but it's the suit-and-tie guy - or woman - doing those funny sideline gyrations, mouthing things unheard, that gives people their early bead on a place.

When the University of New Mexico announced McKay as its men's coach, I got calls from Massachusetts, Connecticut and California, all of them rather breathless at the idea of a black coach in Albuquerque.

Now mind you, every caller was black, which was interesting. Just as interesting is none of them called when McKay was given lame-duck status a few weeks ago. I don't know why, but all the hyperventilation about the positive symbolism of having a black coach seemed to have dissipated.

From my Albuquerque viewpoint, it seems to me that McKay got a decent appraisal from this community as both a man and a coach. I did not hear from any black friends here complaining about any race-based histrionics at either his hiring or firing. There's something to applaud in that and not from low expectations.

People bought where McKay was coming from on his goals as not just a coach of a game but the developer of young men under his tutelage.

By this point, there's a fairly well-understood grasp of the thin reed of a dream that basketball is for black kids. The odds are just not good for NBA glory.

McKay had his share of bumps with some of the players along the way, but I appreciated the way he seemed to be quick to pull the trigger on a problem with some element of deft.

Now, about that pay.

More than a half-million a year, almost a quarter-million more than the school's president at that time, Louis Caldera.

Let's just take race right out of this one. That was a ridiculous amount of money. I don't care what color the coach is. This is the aspect of college sports that turns me off the most.

Honestly, I think that pay scale contributed mightily to what did him in. Combine it with what I'm told is a pretty steep drop in attendance - and revenues - and the whole thing, fair or not, added up to a financial yoke around his neck.

I'm not buying the premise that a basketball program is the great enabler of all other college programs. Never have. So the golf team doesn't draw hordes. Neither does it cost millions to run the darn thing.

So now Ritchie McKay is into the era of the footnote. His legacy, whether we want to acknowledge it fully or look away, is that this black man did us well in the ridiculous, unfair, but ultimately real-as-stone role of representing much more than X's and O's.

At the end of the day, McKay was judged by the content of his character equally as his wins and losses. That legacy will run much deeper.