AUBURN | I’ve seen a lot in my near quarter-century covering Auburn athletics, but I’m not sure I’ve seen anything as authentic as Cadillac Williams over these last four weeks.

I’ve known Cadillac as a player and coach since 2001, but I didn’t know he had THIS in him. Perhaps he didn’t know either.

He has poured himself into this team like no coach I have ever seen at Auburn or anywhere else.

In Saturday night’s postgame interview in the bowels of Bryant-Denny Stadium he looked like a man that was exhausted after a month-long journey, but damn proud of what he and his team accomplished.

In some respects, I wonder if playing for Cadillac is much like it was playing for Pat Dye back in the 1980’s. I imagine Dye was tougher in his approach at times, but his love for his players and Auburn was always genuine and he carried that until the end of his life in 2020.

I don’t know what Cadillac’s future holds but for Auburn’s sake, I hope he remains right here with this team in some capacity.

Auburn and its football program need men like Cadillac leading and serving it.

You get enough good players, a good plan and men like Cadillac teaching them to play together, well, that’s the recipe to getting the Tigers back to playing for championships.

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You better believe I’m surprised to not be writing about a new Auburn coaching hire in this space this morning. My anticipation was for a coach to be named Sunday and for a press conference Monday.

That timeline has obviously changed.

For four weeks, I felt like John Cohen and AU’s administration were running a very thorough and focused search. That search certainly spiraled in the wrong direction over the weekend when Lane Kiffin decided to remain at Ole Miss, for at least another year, and the potential hire of Hugh Freeze brought a backlash from a portion of AU supporters.

There’s no way to spin what happened as a positive and the thought of this search stretching into later this week or even this weekend isn’t ideal.

But in the end, the only thing that matters is hiring the right coach. The one that’s going to recruit, develop and coach on a high enough level to put Auburn in contention to compete for championships.

That’s not an easy job and there’s a lot of schools that will to pay a lot of money, like Auburn, to find the same guy. Can Cohen get it done?

I have no idea. But he’s going to hire a coach before too long and then we’re going to find out for better or worse.

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In today’s musical journey, we go back 35 years to the day a hit song from the dramatic, closing scene of a hit movie rose to the top of the charts. On Nov. 28, 1987, (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life from Dirty Dancing rose to No. 1 on the Billboard 100. The song was written by Frank Previte, the former lead singer of Frankie and the Knockouts, John DeNicola and Donald Markowitz specifically for the film. It was offered to a number of artists including Donna Summer, Daryl Hall and Kim Carnes, and Gladys Knight before Jennifer Warnes agreed to sing it along with Bill Medley from the Righteous Brothers. Warnes was probably best known at the time for her duet with Joe Cocker for Up Where We Belong, which was a hit song from the movie An Officer And A Gentleman. Previte initially created a demo of the song, which Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Gray danced to in the movie. Later, Warnes was able to watch the video to synchronize her singing with the dancing scene including the final lift. (I’ve Had) The Time of My Life won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Original Song, and a Grammy Award. The lift scene in the movie was replicated by Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone in 2011’s Crazy, Stupid, Love. Dirty Dancing was a breakout hit of 1987 with a box office of $214.6 million after costing $4.5 million to make. It was the first movie to sell more than one million home videos.