What's Next for Kentucky Following 2015 Final Four Loss?

This year's national semifinal game between Wisconsin and Kentucky—a 71-64 Badgers win—had it all: bad calls, good calls, no calls, clutch threes, the Player of the Year and a win streak snapped.

ESPN's Jeff Borzello tweeted it best:

That stings. Just like when the New England Patriots went 18-1 and lost the Super Bowl in 2007, Kentucky finishes this season 38-1, and it feels terrible.

“Kentucky had a four-point lead and were in control of the basketball game,” ESPN analyst Seth Greenberg said during SportsCenter. “They allowed themselves to be defended instead of running an offense and getting a shot.”

Of all the teams in the tournament, are there any that leverage the kind of confidence Kentucky has to reach a third straight Final Four appearance in 2016? Of course not.

Under head coach John Calipari, Kentucky doesn’t rebuild. It reloads, as the saying goes. That’s the key: under Calipari. It's a universal belief that Calipari gets lobbied by NBA execs to make the jump back to the NBA, the site of his last professional failure.

"He desperately wants it. He won’t say it out loud," an NBA front office official told Steve Popper of The Record. "The NBA is the only place he’s ever failed and it drives him nuts. He’s not the same guy he was then. He came to the NBA and he wasn’t ready. He’s ready now."

Maybe the former New Jersey Nets coach is readier now. In some ways, he already coaches a minor league NBA team at Kentucky. He's a god in Lexington, and the only way he'll leave is if he's bored.

What more can Calipari do at the college level? He coached UMass to a Final Four. He coached Memphis to the title game. He won a title and was runner-up at Kentucky already. He came within two games of 40-0. There's a gravitational pull to the NBA, but Calipari will stay since there's unfinished business now. If he goes to the NBA, it'll be with a freshly cut net around his neck.

Without a second title, he'll likely just stay and continue to challenge the norms of college basketball, be the Mike Krzyzewski of Kentucky.

If that’s the case, then the face of Kentucky as we know it will remain frighteningly familiar.

The Wildcats we saw walk off the court at Lucas Oil Stadium will have little in common with the team we’ll see at Midnight Madness in six months.

Aaron Harrison, Andrew Harrison, Willie Cauley-Stein, Karl-Anthony Towns and Trey Lyles will likely be gone. They served their purpose in blue and white—pieces in the winning machine—and will be replaced in a few months' time by another platoon of the country’s best young players.

Calipari already signed two 5-star recruits in Isaiah Briscoe (No. 13 in the 2015 recruiting class) and Skal Labissiere (No. 3). Briscoe is an unselfish, dynamic point guard and Labissiere is a raw, 6’10”, 200-pound big man who could—in time—fill the shoes of Cauley-Stein.

Briscoe has what could be the makings of a John Wall. He was one of the standout players in the McDonald’s All-American Game earlier this week, scoring 11 points, pulling down five rebounds and dishing out three assists in his team's win.

Gregory Payan/Associated Press

Players like Jaylen Brown (No. 2) and Malik Newman (No. 4) have yet to commit, and Kentucky remains high on their lists.

“I'd like to play with Jaylen Brown and Malik Newman. I'm going to need someone on the wing to catch and shoot," Briscoe said during the ESPN broadcast of the McDonald’s All-American Game.

While Duke and Wisconsin tangle for the national championship, Kentucky will be hard at work setting its sights on a fresh title run.

As for returning players, Tyler Ulis, Devin Booker, Alex Poythress—who will fulfill major leadership roles the way Cauley-Stein did this year—Marcus Lee and Dakari Johnson should all be back. Booker can shoot with the best of them and could use another year to be more "NBA-ready."

Once the sting of this loss fades away, Kentucky will be just fine.

In fact, once Calipari unleashes the 2015-16 Wildcats with fill-in-the-blank McDonald’s All-Americans, the 2014-15 team will be but a distant, rose-colored memory of a season so close to perfect.

“This season is historic,” Calipari said during the postgame press conference on Saturday. “I just can’t believe anybody is going to do what these kids just did to get to this point unblemished with the schedule they played, then how they did it."

“We would have loved to have been 40-0. Let’s see if we can take another stab at it,” he said.

And that’s the thing: Calipari and Kentucky actually can take another stab at it.

Recruiting information courtesy of 247Sports.