Last year while I was at the Big Ten Men’s Basketball Tournament, a face appeared on the scoreboard at the United Center – a wrinkled, white-haired, grandfatherly face, intently following the game. He glanced up and noticed himself on the scoreboard. Despite having his arms folded sternly across his chest, he flashed his familiar gap-toothed smile. The crowd cheered, and the cheer soon swelled to a standing ovation.

“Who’s that?” asked a man’s son, no more than eight years old, in the row behind us. My friend and I turned and at the same time said to him simply, “That’s Coach.”

For millions of Chicagoans, former DePaul Coach Ray Meyer was Chicago basketball, and his death Friday at the age 92 of congestive heart failure leaves us a gaping hole. He was to Chicago basketball what Mike Krzyzewski is to Duke, what Dean Smith is to North Carolina, what John Wooden is to UCLA. His 42-year tenure at DePaul — from 1942 to 1984 — makes Michael Jordan’s stay seem like a flash in the pan.

Meyer was one of only seven college basketball coaches to earn more than 700 victories. He coached two teams to the NCAA Final Four. In 1945, while leading a gangly, awkward kid by the name of George Mikan, he won the NIT when it was considered the national championship. In 1979, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

But to us, he was always just Coach.

Coach hosted a summer basketball camp on his property in Three Lakes, Wis. So in my younger days, for one week every summer, a couple friends and I would venture up north to spend a week with Coach in which we ate, slept and breathed basketball.

The camp was cut out of a patch of Wisconsin woods, with crude wooden cabins surrounding several asphalt courts, each framed by a set of wooden-backboard baskets. In the mornings, we did drills, with each coach running a station — fast break, defense, ball handling and the like. Coach’s station, every year, was the pick-and-roll.

Each morning you could count on hearing Coach’s voice imploring a lethargic pick-setter, saying slowly, plaintively, “It’s a pick and ROLL, son, not a pick and STAND.” Or, if a kid was really slow to grasp the concept, he’d be told, “If you put your brain in a bird, the damn thing would fly backwards,” while his friends giggled behind their hands.

After lunch he’d do the mail call. He could flick letters 30 feet across the cafeteria to their recipients with uncanny accuracy. And heaven forbid someone send you a forbidden package. Many a boy those summers ate crushed cookies because Coach would set the package on the ground, climb onto his chair and, as the campers pounded out a drum roll on the lunch tables, the man in his late 70s would jump down onto the unfortunate box.

Many of us remember clinging for dear life to an inner tube that was attached, by a long rope, to Coach’s powerboat. He’d spend his afternoons flinging us across the lake at impossible speeds, looking back over his shoulder now and then with that same familiar — though now slightly devilish — grin.

But what most of us will remember most is that every summer, a guy who could have taken a well-earned rest and retirement, instead hosted a bunch of us punk kids who weren’t worthy of carrying his knee-high athletic socks and cared about us. If you were struggling, he’d pull you aside and talk to you. It didn’t matter your color, age or even ability. Coach cared about you and tried to make you a better player and a better person. I’ll always remember the depth of kindness and humility beneath his teasing exterior, given away only by that little twinkle in his eye.

He loved basketball. That made him a great coach, a legend. But he loved and cared about people too. That made him a great leader and a great man.