Miami football and Mario Cristobal remain a perfect pairing

CORAL GABLES, Fla. — In the middle of the toughest professional decision of his life, Mario Cristobal dialed a familiar phone number.

Over 3,000 miles from Eugene, Oregon, in Stuart, Florida, Dennis Lavelle picked up. Cristobal wanted to know what his former high school coach at Christopher Columbus High thought of the move that, at that point, Lavelle had only heard rumors about: Cristobal's potential return to Miami as the Hurricanes' new head coach.

«You're 51 years old now,» Lavelle told Cristobal. «And you got a chance to go home.… You got to go.»

Lavelle's voice was more affirmation than anything. From an institutional standpoint, everything had to be right at Miami for Cristobal to come back to the place he grew up and won national championships in 1989 and 1991. But outside of the white lines, the gravitational pull of family, culture, tradition and history carried a significance that has only become more evident as Cristobal has settled into his new digs.

«He's got his Cuban coffee, his arroz con pollo and flan, and all that stuff,» Lavelle said. «He's in heaven.»

It's true that Cristobal wanted this. He even once told former Hurricanes coach Butch Davis that his ultimate goal was to have the job Davis had. But the reality still feels surreal for a kid of Cuban exiles who made an effort to send him and his brother Luis to a private school like Columbus. There, he spent his time after practice driving or biking to Miami practices with his friend and now fellow coach Alex Mirabal. Back then, the two envisioned a path stitched together by childhood dreams. Now, the duo hatch game plans together inside buildings that commemorate the players who drew them to those practices in the first place.

«You remember the