SOUTH BEND – Maybe this is what you need here, a man who takes the game ball from his athletic director and considers the remembrance case handled. Maybe you need the guy who’s had his nostalgia organ removed, who doesn’t converse with the statuary, who fails to get all weepy when the students chant his name or somebody brings up Rockne.

Here was Brian Kelly, sometime before 3:30 on a cloud-and-sun Saturday afternoon, three hours before he sent Purdue home on the puny end of a 23-12 score: jogging out of the tunnel in Notre Dame Stadium, his boys all around him, 80,795 souls making the place fizz with hope and optimism and dear-God-please-let-him-be-the-one yearning.

Here was Brian Kelly 10 seconds later: leaving all that behind.

Unobtrusively, unremarkably, just another man in a pale gold pullover, he peeled off as soon as decently possible, physically ditching the moment. As his boys charged on without him, he headed for the sideline and his day’s work.

Savoring the moment ain’t him. There’s too many moments yet to come to worry about.

“You know, throughout my entire career, I’ve never really kind of looked back on the accomplishments,” he said later. “I’ve always been so focused on the process that I think that what I will reflect on is the things we didn’t do that we needed to do.

“Maybe it’s just the DNA; maybe it’s the coach in me. I just have never, ever taken the time to go, ‘Boy, what a great job you did today getting your first win at Notre Dame.’ ”

And so he peeled off to the sideline and his football team trotted out to meet Purdue, and pretty soon Armando Allen and Cierre Wood were finding great open running lanes out of Kelly’s signature spread. Dayne Crist was moving the ball around to one, two, seven different receivers. And the Irish were up 7-0, 10-0, 13-3, 20-3.

Eventually, Crist wound up with a 19-of-26, 205-yard day. Allen ran for 93 yards and Wood averaged 8.3 yards per carry. And the Irish defense was observed tackling someone for the first time since, oh, 2005 or so, at one point leaving the faithful gaping at an opponent’s down-and-distance number they hadn’t seen in ages: fourth-and-32.

At last Purdue quarterback Robert Marve fled the gold helmets one last time and chucked the football downfield to no one in particular, and the thing was done. The students chanted “Kel-ly! Kel-ly! Kel-ly!” out of the sunlight and shadow. Joe Montana headed for the tunnel. Notre Dame Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, without ceremony, handed Kelly the game ball, and everyone headed off to the postgame.

“A lot of people see you as the white knight coming in to save the program,” someone said. “Do you see yourself that way?”

Kelly never missed a beat.

“Oh, yeah, exactly,” he deadpanned. “I couldn’t put it any better.”

And then: “What is a white knight anyway?”

Maybe, just maybe, it’s the guy who can take the lore out of the place, who can ignore Joe Montana on the sideline and the statues outside the stadium and just go win football games. Maybe it’s the guy who can appreciate the win but understands that it wasn’t USC or Florida or Alabama, but a Purdue team that, as coach Danny Hope noted, played “as many as 20 new guys today.”

So hand the man his game ball, and be snappy about it. He’s got work to do.

“He wasn’t focused on the walk into the facility,” is how Swarbrick put it. “He’s focused on getting this team better.”

Outside the stadium, as he said that, a man ushered his small son to a waiting golf cart. ESPN personality Mike Golic and his two football-playing sons, Mike Jr. and Jake, were sitting in it. Dad raised a camera; everyone said cheese.

Brian Kelly missed it all. Or not at all, as the case may be.