“With five years, I know some people may say, ‘Oh, you need to go get a job now,’” Davis said with a chuckle.

It’s the last ride for Davis — the lone returning Associated Press first-team men’s All-American from last season — and most players who gained an extra year of eligibility amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which largely cycles out of men’s and women’s basketball this season. It has been the most unusual of recent landscape-shifting changes in college sports, one that temporarily replaced a bedrock tenet of athletes having a four-season run with a salve for competing amid empty arenas, campus bubbles and endless nose-swab testing during the 2020-21 season.