This is an opinion column.

You will attend your own funeral. You will not, however, be able to take roll or measure the toll your passing has taken on the people who cared enough to show up and say good-bye.

Fortunately for us mere mortals, there’s another way to get a sense of the depth of the footprints we’ll leave behind. Get inducted to a Hall of Fame. The honor is validation enough for your life’s work, but there can be extra sprinkles of satisfaction atop the ceremony itself when special people are present for your special occasion.

Jimmy Tillette was inducted into the Samford Athletics Hall of Fame on Saturday evening, an honor richly deserved for the school’s all-time winningest basketball coach, who led the Bulldogs to their first two NCAA Tournament appearances a quarter century ago. He spent 21 years there as assistant and head coach proving that student-athletes do exist.

There are a multitude of ways to measure Tillette’s impact on that campus, as perhaps the most professorial coach in any sport in school history, and on that profession, as an offensive guru whose own spin on the Princeton offense challenged his players to learn it and their opponents to stop it.