It’s been only a few months, but Louisville coach Jeff Brohm has experienced all the tropes associated with moving back to your hometown. He’s revisiting his old haunts, bumping into graying high school and college buddies at the grocery store and getting invited to countless events. For Brohm, there are no strangers in Louisville, including an immediate and extended family of die-hard, opinionated Cardinals fans.

“I knew when I came home that it would be all Louisville, which would require a little more of my time,” Brohm said. “All the family members, they’re giving it to me — by text, on the phone, in person. They’re telling us all the things we need to be doing. It’s great, but that’s the thing you have to balance.”

It’s the blessing and burden the Louisville native inherits as a former quarterback (1989-93) and assistant coach (2003-08) for the Cardinals returning to his alma mater after 15 years.

Yet in other ways, it feels as if Brohm never truly left. Because in some ways, he never did.

“My wife and I actually kept the house that we bought here about 20 years ago,” Brohm said, chuckling. “Even when we were gone, we still came back quite a bit because both our families are here. We may eventually find a new house in town at some point, but it was so easy just to come back to our own place. I told my wife and daughter, ‘If you two wanna look for something else, go ahead, but I’m not looking for anything.’”

The turnkey living situation made a smooth transition even smoother for Brohm, who was announced as head coach of Louisville on Dec. 8 following six seasons as head coach at Purdue. It was a hire years in the making: a hometown hero and one of the most prominent figures in Cardinals history brought back to stabilize and elevate a program toiling through the ever-shifting landscape of college football. An established, job-secure Big Ten coach chose a school that has teetered between six regimes in the past 25 seasons.