Indianapolis — Carla Berube's life is exactly as she wants it. Wife and mother. Coaching at a great school. Living in a hip city. Her present is a daily present.

It's just that nobody ever asks her where she is. Maybe it's this irrepressible desire to look over our shoulders or worry about what's around the corner. It's all about yesterday and tomorrow.

Carla Berube's yesterday: A player on Geno Auriemma's first national championship team at UConn, way back there in 1995.

Carla Berube's tomorrow: Now that she's led the women's basketball program at Tufts University to four Final Fours since 2004 and Monday night's Division III national championship game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, she's supposed to be looking ahead to the next great job available.

"This is what I get," Berube was saying Sunday morning inside the Westin Hotel in downtown Indy, "from reporters, other coaches and sometimes families of recruits: 'When are you going to move up?' I'm really happy where I am. It's hard to leave something great for who knows what. I'm happy now."

She sure is. The narratives about her old days at UConn when she had less to say than Marcel Marceau, or the idea she's looking at more glamorous locales than Medford ("Meffa" to the townies), Mass., just don't apply. There is nothing semi-Tufts about her. She's all in.

Carla's story: After graduation, she moved to San Luis Obispo, Calif., whose geographic distance from Storrs and hometown Oxford, Mass., mirrored its differences in pace and expectations.

"I did some odd jobs out there that really helped me with being an introvert," Berube said. "I came out of my shell. The other thing is that I learned how much I missed basketball."

Berube became a volunteer assistant at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo before moving back to New England, where she was a full-time assistant at Providence. And to think at that point, she could have been all ours.

"After my first year at Providence, the Conn College job opened up (in 2001)," Berube said. "They had contacted me. That's when I learned about NESCAC and Division III. I fell in love with the mission behind it. At that point, I wasn't ready to take on my own program. But I caught the bug about Division III."

It should be noted here that Conn would make a home run hire a few years later in current coach Brian Wilson, whose Camels defeated Tufts earlier this year.

And while Berube has certainly enjoyed her time here in the city awaiting the national championship game, she's equally happy with bus rides to those NESCAC garden spots: Hamilton, N.Y., Brunswick, Maine ...

"I have a great balance of life. Tufts is such great academic institution," Berube said. "We recruit great student-athletes who have a great passion for basketball, for what they're doing in the classroom and they have other interests outside of that. One of my seniors works for the Tufts Daily (newspaper) as an editor. She's always writing things down.

"It's a balance of life for me, too. It's not basketball 365 days a year. I can bring my son (Parker, 2) into the office if I need to. I wear other hats at Tufts. I'm the home contest manager at women's soccer games, an adjudicator in office of equal opportunity and I've been working on my Master's. I love Boston. It's feels like home to me."

Imagine: being happy where you are, even if it's not Broadway. Lost in dollar signs of college athletics is their truer, more practical purpose: instill skills and values that help prepare young people for adult life. Acclaimed college athletes have the same fears as other twentysomethings who are staring at The Real World without the comfort and stability playing on a team provides.

The Tufts kids are lucky to have her.

"Carla always had a quiet confidence about her and really understood how to play," UConn associate head coach Chris Dailey said. "She only knew winning. She was a winner coming out of high school, she won in college. She's won at everything she's done. Her team is a reflection of her. That's a program, not a one shot deal in the finals."

It would be hyperbole to suggest Berube is strictly a product of UConn. She is a product of all her life experiences. But there's some UConn there to be sure.

She is part Geno: "There are some similarities in our coaching style. I'm pretty sarcastic myself." A former player, Katle Gluckman, once said of her, "She dropped to the floor with her head in her hands after one play. ... God, I really shouldn't be telling you this."

She is part Dailey: "I want them all looking alike. I don't want them coming to breakfast in different clothes. There's time to be an individual and time to be a Tufts basketball player. I really stress that we're always representing our university and our program. Those are things CD is adamant about. I have some of that in me, just not to her level."

Some Tufts players were walking about "Tourney Town" in downtown Indy when some UConn fans noticed them earlier this weekend. They called them "Carla's kids." Indeed. Carla Berube is all grown up now. She has her kids at Tufts. She has little Parker. She has a happy life. Where she is.

This is the opinion of Day sports columnist Mike DiMauro.