Bill Self, we hardly knew ye, and you know what? That’s your loss.

Some day coaches finally will get it that putting down water-lily roots affords very little in the way of lasting satisfaction. Self left Illinois for Kansas University Sunday (Easter Sunday — what a guy), and aside from his players and the most rabid of Illini fans, the reaction has to be a shrug.

The wise fan learns not to get attached to a college basketball coach, especially a coach who jumps from job to job like a migrant worker. There are very few coaches anymore who don’t fit that description.

For years Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim has taken loads of abuse for being a whiner, a complainer and a coach who has the appearance of a man who subsists on sour milk. But he won the NCAA Tournament this year, and that he did it after 27 years as the Orangemen’s head coach says more about him and his values than a national title ever could.

When are these guys going to get it? The victories are great and the money is awesome, but the coaches who have stayed in one place for a long time will tell you the connection with a school, the relationships with the people involved and the longevity are more rewarding.

Boeheim equals Syracuse.

Rick Pitino equals Boston University-Providence-New York Knicks-Kentucky-Boston Celtics-Louisville-Whatever Better Opportunity Comes Next.

Self stayed three seasons in Champaign, and what he once described as a place where a man could stay a long time turned out to be just another rung on the ladder. If you’ve been paying any attention to the coaching world the past 20 years or so, you knew when he uttered those words not to believe a consonant or a vowel of it.

So the feeling here is one of overwhelming numbness. You put up an emotional barrier from getting too close to these people because they will run at the first whiff of a better job. You try not to get too involved. You try to know as much as you can about the coach, but deep down, the only thing you really know is that he won’t be long for Your School, USA.

It’s hard to begrudge Self for going to Kansas. This is one of basketball’s blue-blood programs, the type of job opening that has coaches tying on bibs, what with the tendency toward salivation. And if you don’t think that was an issue — if you don’t think most everyone in the coaching fraternity was telling Self he couldn’t turn down the Kansas job — then you don’t understand the coaching business. Self spent the past two or three days talking to his coaching buddies. Should he take the job? Should he stay? Should he ask for more money? Is there an annuity package involved?

He didn’t call his players to ask their opinions until he’d already decided to go.

The players are hardly ever asked. Interesting, isn’t it?

Please, coaches: Lose the speeches about a basketball team being a family.

If Illinois’ players were part of Self’s family, if all those young players on his roster were his children, Bill Self wouldn’t be leaving them. He couldn’t.

Emotionally, then, he is nothing more than a deadbeat dad.

The coach’s defenders will say Self is doing nothing more than exercising his freedom to take a job. It’s no different, they’ll say, than someone moving from IBM to Microsoft.

The big difference and the unconscionable thing about the coaching carousel is that a group of young players and even younger recruits rely on these coaches.

He doesn’t have a group of young, impressionable people looking to him for direction. A coach does.

Self apparently didn’t promise the Illinois players he would stay, unlike Roy Williams, who announced three years ago he would remain at Kansas until he retired or was fired. That makes Self a little better than Williams, who left for North Carolina.

The shame of this is that Self might have been able to turn Illinois into a Kansas. How rewarding would that have been? How rewarding would it have been to take something with potential and turn it into something truly beautiful? But coaches don’t look at jobs that way anymore.

Maybe the next coach will. Maybe that next coach will be Marquette’s Tom Crean. Wouldn’t it be something, though, if Crean looked around and decided he loved Marquette, decided he wanted to spend the rest of his career in Milwaukee? Decided he wanted to build something special from the sturdy foundation of a Final Four appearance this season?

It might just make the numbness go away.