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WINSTON-SALEM — An era of good intentions will end today at Wake Forest amid sentiments of an opportunity missed, a time of great and unfulfilled expectations and a feeling of what could have been.

We'll never know how it would've turned out. It's a sad day in a sense, because what Skip Prosser and Dino Gaudio set out to do worked. It just didn't quite take.

Wake Forest will announce the hiring of Jeff Bzdelik this morning, ending the great basketball experiment started by Prosser in 2001 that was going to make the Deacons basketball program a national name. There will be no more ties to the past, no more pipelines to Xavier or Pittsburgh or Central Catholic High School in Wheeling, W.Va.

A series of events set into motion with the death of Prosser in 2007 will end today when Ron Wellman officially replaces Prosser's right-hand man with a friend of his own. Bzdelik will take over the Wake program at a 10 a.m. news conference in Deacon Tower.

The great irony will always be that everything Prosser planned worked out exactly as he'd hoped, everything except winning the big one. He recruited the state, taking away parts of the Carolina-Duke base while they looked elsewhere. He recruited nationally, going after Greg Oden and Michael Conley, landing players like James Johnson and Jeff Teague and Al-Farouq Aminu. He left a powerhouse program behind, one that Gaudio would take to No. 1 in the nation.

But like his mentor before him, Gaudio could never win the big game when it mattered most. And for that, Wellman will end it today by bringing in someone outside the circle to rebuild Wake Forest basketball, ironically with Gaudio's players.

There's a theory within the Wake community that no one could have done a better job than Gaudio did. No one could've taken the swirling collection of knotheads that made up the Deacons' program and done it any differently. No one could've kept the teams together as long as he did, combining their psyches and their strange tendencies to go completely bonkers at key times in the biggest games, dealing with NBA aspirations and immature personalities that performed and failed dramatically on the biggest stages.

No one except Prosser. He was the one who brought them all together, the enigmatic Chas McFarland, the unpredictable Johnson and the easily manipulated Teague. No one could've dealt with the sporadic nature of Ish Smith's game or the selfishness of Aminu or the bizarre antics of the teams en toto.

No one except Prosser. He was the only one smart enough, confident enough and just crazy enough to have pulled it off. And when he died, there was no hope of keeping all the moving parts moving in the same direction.

Gaudio did it for a time, but when things started to go wrong, they went very wrong. We might never know this for certain, but the new recruits coming in, which would've been Gaudio's first full class of recruits, represent a break from Prosser's style. The speedy, athletic player coveted by the old boat driver was being phased out. Gaudio was going to bring in a different kind of player, more cerebral and less flashy, more controlled and, in theory, more coachable.

Now someone else will coach them. First, he has to keep them.

We'll look back on this period as one that sort of worked and sort of didn't work. Wake won a lot of basketball games, and Prosser re-energized the program after Dave Odom's teams lost momentum and came apart in an NCAA tournament game against Butler. The end of Odom's tenure had a similar feel, a sadness, a longing for what could've been.

Prosser transformed Wake Forest, bringing in piped-in music, tie-dyed T-shirts, a motorcycle and speed, breaking from the staid, old traditions at Wake and welcoming the fanbase to a jungle of noise and expectations. He went after the best players in the nation, landed a few and missed on a few. He got the Deacons into the living rooms of some of the best and some of the most eccentric players we've seen.

He was the only one who could've coached them. And we'll never know how it all would've turned out. We'll be introduced to a new Wake Forest coach today and wonder if we'll ever pass this way again. Everybody's second-favorite school is going through another basketball transformation after the last grand plan proved to be too vast for one man to control.

Everything worked as Prosser planned. It just didn't last.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com