MORGANTOWN — Alex Ruoff doesn’t remember all there is to remember, he having been a bit too young at the time. He was living in Hamilton, Ohio, a town just 30 miles north of Cincinnati, a town that had produced a couple of major league baseball players in Joe Nuxhall and Jim Tracy.

Ruoff, though, fancied himself something of a basketball player, even then. He wasn’t yet 12, but he could shoot and he could pass and in those days, a decade ago, the University of Cincinnati was king of his basketball world.

He was more a fan of the players than the coach, whom he didn’t know much about, other than his name — Bob Huggins.

But he loved those Bearcats.

“I was so young, just 12 when I left back in 1998,” he said.

Let’s see, 1998 was a year when Cincinnati went 27-6, won the Conference USA regular season and the tournament, went to the second round of the NCAA Tournament, where it lost to … oh, yeah, West Virginia on Jarod West’s game-winning shot at the buzzer up in Boise, Idaho.

It was one of the toughest losses Huggins ever experienced.

Ruoff moved to Florida and became a college prospect, which meant he had some workouts for college coaches.

“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “I had my Cincinnati shorts on working out for those college coaches. I loved red and black.”

Such was the effect Bob Huggins had on the Cincinnati area.

He built a monster of a program there, one that came under heavy criticism for his lack of graduating students, for some of the trouble they got into and, yes, for the trouble he got into.

A saint Bob Huggins isn’t and never has pretended that he was.

In the midst of the 2004-05 season Huggins came under tremendous pressure from the University of Cincinnati administration, headed by President Nancy Zimpher. Upset with the graduation rate, with some player arrests, Huggins’ own far-too-public DUI and another of an assistant coach, she pushed him out the door.

All of that makes what will take place tonight at the Fifth Third Arena on the Cincinnati campus a rather incredible occurrence, for the same school that actually drove him away will now honor him upon his return for the first time as head coach at West Virginia.

The town is abuzz.

A pair of electronic billboards high above Interstates 71 and 75 feature of photo of Huggins and Mick Cronin, the current Bearcat coach who was once Huggins assistant before leaving to work under Rick Pitino at Louisville.

The Cincinnati Enquirer published an all-Huggs team, which was not exactly too shabby considering it included Kenyon Martin, Danny Fortson, Herb Jones, Nick Van Excel and Steve Logan.

Not everyone, of course, is favor of honoring Huggins. While Cincinnati fans were in an uproar over the administration’s tactics and to this day have yet to really come back into the mother ship Cincinnati, there was a minority who felt Huggins had got what he asked for.

Perhaps the thing that best symbolizes the dichotomy of views is a placard that is being given out to fans in attendance at the game.

On one side it says, “Thanks, Huggs.”

On the other side it says, “Go Bearcats.”

Surely it will be an emotional evening on ESPN, although it can never match the emotion when Huggins returned at the request of former player Eric Hicks on Senior Day the season he left the team, a game against West Virginia in which his players all went over and hugged him as Zimpher looked on from her box above the court.

To be honest, this night to honor Huggins is probably mistimed, for it should come during his farewell tour as a coach. The game in which it is being held is too important to both teams, more so the homestanding Bearcats, to have such a circus act as a distraction.

Cronin’s Bearcats need this victory to solidify their chance to get into the NCAA Tournament, something they haven’t been able to do since Huggins led them to the NCAAs for 14 straight years.

And Huggins’ West Virginia team is fighting for a bye in the conference tournament, which goes to the top eight seeds, plus to help itself with its NCAA seed by scoring a road conference victory and adding a fourth straight win.

To add to the intrigue there is a matter of revenge involved, for Cincinnati came to Morgantown last year and completely embarrassed Huggins and his Mountaineers. Unable to shake off a heart-wrenching one-point loss to Georgetown in the game before when Patrick Ewing Jr. blocked Da’Sean Butler’s layup at the buzzer, the Mountaineers came out without any life at all.

They scored but 39 points, went 10 for 50 from the floor, missed all but one of their 22 3-points attempts and were beaten on the boards 47-26 by a team that would finish 12-19 on the season.

“It was the fastest game I’ve ever been in, in all my life,” Wellington Smith told the Charleston Daily Mail. “They came in and punched us in the mouth instead of us punching them in the mouth and the next thing you knew it was over and we ended up getting blown out on our home court.”

Email Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.