When this long, strange season started, Mike Pegues was taking notes.

Back then he was the acting head coach of the Louisville men’s basketball team, in charge temporarily while his boss Chris Mack sat out a university-mandated six-game suspension. And in his first head-coaching go-round, Pegues was jotting down more than Xs and Os.

“I actually journaled the first six games,” Pegues said. “Those 23 days I had notes on how my day went.”

It’s advice he got from Marquette coach Shaka Smart, but Pegues admitted that he didn’t pick up the practice again when he took over as the Cardinals’ interim head coach Jan. 26 after U of L and Mack reached a separation agreement.

It was too sudden. There’s been too little time. So Pegues has relied more on mental notes.

And maybe that’s just as well.

This second stretch as a head coach— which almost certainly will conclude with Louisville’s next loss, likely at this week’s ACC Tournament in Brooklyn, N.Y. — will be a lot less fun to revisit than the first.

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Pegues went 5-1 to open the season. He’s 1-11 since Louisville parted ways with Mack.

“I tell you what, I enjoyed the first one more than this one,” Pegues said. “That goes without saying. Had a little more time to prepare for that one than I did this one. But it is all such a blessing.”

That’s the approach Pegues has taken publicly almost without fail since he took charge in January. And though he’s not keeping notes, the news conferences he’s held since could be his document of those days.

He’s been open. Honest. Raw. Maybe to a fault sometimes. Pegues criticized his team as uncoachable after a loss to Miami, then tried to dial it back after his lone win so far as the interim coach, against Clemson.

But throughout, Pegues has almost unfailingly treated this challenging opportunity as more benefit than burden.

After the Clemson game, he said that “no matter how much longer” he was at Louisville, he was thankful to have been at a place where the fans in the stands screamed their support for a team than on a seven-game losing streak.

Last week he marveled that he’d “snuck in” to a photo of outgoing Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and Louisville legend Denny Crum on Jan. 29, when U of L honored Coach K before its game against the Blue Devils.

“LIke a bystander just walking through, right?” Pegues said and laughed.

Sometimes when he’s running on the treadmill at the Kueber Center, Louisville’s on-campus practice facility, Pegues said he reminds himself that “it’s a blessing to be here.”

“Not many people can say they’ve been the head coach of Louisville basketball, and I’m one of them,” Pegues said. "And despite the record — and I’m not proud of that at all — it’s something that’s been a really rewarding experience, something that I’ll definitely learn from.”

While learning, he’s tried to teach.

He’s altered Louisville’s offense, essentially scrapping what was left of the pace-and-space system it deployed to start the season and switching to a scheme designed to better take advantage of the Cards’ personnel. There are more post-ups for surging center Sydney Curry and more emphasis than ever on the ball finding its way to the paint.

But Pegues has had to focus on more than post feeds and pick-and-roll coverages.

He took over a fractured team. His task has been to bind it as best he can then hand it off to someone else. And Pegues has done “a pretty stellar job” of that, Curry said.

“He didn’t expect to be head coach at all,” guard Jarrod West said. “And then let alone twice. So for him to have to take over the reins and then back off and then unexpectedly take over again with Duke and (North) Carolina as the first two games, that’s a tough task. It’s hard to ask anybody to do that.”

Pegues has done it with mixed results.

But he clearly won over his players to start the season. So much so that after Mack left Louisville, center Malik Williams admitted it had been tough for the Cardinals to adapt back to Mack after growing comfortable with Pegues.

The Cards’ improvement than was apparent, and Louisville (12-18, 6-14 ACC) hasn’t looked better in back-to-back games than it did under Pegues’ direction at the Baha Mar Hoops Bahamas Championship in Nassau.

The Cardinals won that tournament title in November, and Pegues smoking a victory cigar after is a lasting image of joy in a mostly miserable season. Pegues has it on a t-shirt, he said. His wife put it on a mousepad.

It’s not lost on the interim coach or his players that the Cardinals won a trophy that day.

If the 11th-seeded Cards are clinging to anything as they open ACC Tournament play against No. 14 seed Georgia Tech (12-19, 5-15) on Tuesday, it’s that they excelled in that Bahamas setting. They got one tournament trophy, so why not another?

This one will be harder to hoist.

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Louisville would need five wins in five days. It would have to fight past teams likely headed to the NCAA tournament, which it hasn’t done since it beat Wake Forest on Dec. 29. It would have to win its first games outside the KFC Yum Center since Jan. 2 in Atlanta, the last time it beat Georgia Tech.

But as Pegues winds down a season that started with jotting down journal entries, his team has one last chance to do something noteworthy.

And true to form, he’s looking less at the challenge in front of him than the opportunity it presents.

“Coaches usually game plan a little differently (in tournaments) and they throw some wrinkles at you that you haven't seen, so I’m excited about that,” Pegues said. “I'm living the dream. It's a rough dream. Sometimes it's a nightmare. But it’s still something. I never expected to be here, and I’m gonna get every minute out of it. Every single minute.”

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: U of L basketball coach Mike Pegues 'living the dream' long as he can