Future the only topic at Florida

The official Florida celebration in Gainesville last year after the Gators won their first NCAA basketball title was the stage Joakim Noah chose to announce he and his teammates would return to try to repeat, saying, “We’re back, baby!”

Florida fans eager to hear Coach Billy Donovan say he will stay in Gainesville -- and Kentucky fans pining after him -- can only hope the resolution this time comes as soon as the celebration that is scheduled for Friday.

Nobody from Kentucky greeted Donovan with a cup of coffee and a contract offer Tuesday morning after he stayed up all night basking in his second national championship, then appeared for an 8:30 a.m. news conference.

Still, Donovan and his family clearly expect the overture from Kentucky, and his father said Donovan would weigh the opportunity.

In the meantime, Donovan has other plans, and if his agent and the search firm representing Kentucky were talking while he was coaching the Gators in the Final Four, Donovan insisted nobody told him.

“If that’s happened, I’m not aware of it,” he said, adding that he has an agent, but “I haven’t talked to him in over a week.”

“It’s hard for me to comment about anything,” Donovan said. “I think maybe people feel like I’m being coy or trying to move around questions. I’m not doing that. There’s nothing for me to say.

“I haven’t talked to anybody. I haven’t spoken to anybody. So, yeah, my intentions are to be at the University of Florida and coaching their basketball team.”

He also uses the words “right now” a lot, so take that with a grain of salt.

Exactly who will be on the Florida team remains to be seen, but the junior-class core that won its second consecutive title Monday is widely expected to leave for the NBA draft. Donovan is proceeding as if they will, though he held out a faint possibility they’d chose otherwise, calling them “a different group of guys.”

The more intense speculation is about what Donovan will do, and if Kentucky officials or their representatives want to catch up with him, they have a moving target.

On Wednesday, he will be in West Virginia to make a speech to boosters at Marshall, the school that gave him his first head coaching job. On Friday, the Gators will hold their official celebration.

On Saturday, he goes to the Dominican Republic for a week for a 70th-birthday celebration for his father-in-law -- although if Miami Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga could find Pete Carroll for a chat in Costa Rica, Kentucky can find Donovan in the Dominican.

There are echoes of North Carolina courting Roy Williams in 2003, when Williams was peppered with the same sort of questions while coaching Kansas at the Final Four. The expected offer came in the days after the title game, and Williams was still agonizing over the decision at the Wooden Award ceremony that weekend, saying he nearly called Carolina to say no.

On Monday, one week after the championship game, he was introduced as the Tar Heels’ coach.

Donovan’s case is different, in part because, as he noted, he has few remaining connections to Kentucky since leaving 13 years ago. And unlike Williams at Kansas, he has a good relationship with his athletic director, Jeremy Foley. But even though Donovan has repeated that he is happy at Florida, he has never said he wouldn’t listen to Kentucky.

“I have not spoken to anybody. I haven’t done anything. Nothing has changed for me,” he said. “I really don’t know what else to say at this point.”

robyn.norwood@latimes.com