SAN FRANCISCO — Among the many lessons of the Kevin Willard fiasco, one is: If you’re going to skedaddle out of town — run out by the very flames you helped stoke — you’d best do it fast.

Don’t do it like Willard did it, in a tortured process that clearly started before Maryland’s biggest game of the season only to drag out days past the unseemly Sweet 16 loss.

Don’t pile up meaningless words in a season-ending press conference, saying you’re not sure what’s going to happen when it’s obvious to everyone you’re cutting bait.

After his team lost 87-71 to Florida thanks to a listless second half, Willard should have taken it as a kind of divine sign when his podium bloodletting was cut off by the ring of a reporter’s cellphone just as the 49-year-old seemed set to dig himself a little deeper.

“I understand fans are going to be pissed because I’m in limbo and this and that — I get it,” he said. “I’m kind of pissed, to be honest with you, because I didn’t expect to be in this situation. But …”

Ring, ring, ring. The break in decorum was just long enough for the interview moderator to dismiss Willard from the gallows where he almost slipped his neck through a noose. “That phone call saved me,” he said just off mic.

But, instead of following through with a similarly abrupt end to three seasons with the Terps, Willard let fans twist in the wind for two more days — two days of stress, two days during the all-important transfer portal window and two days that offered no hope that he would shift course. Instead, he did what everyone thought in the first place and left for Villanova.

It’s a damn shady thing following a week and a half of bluster that Willard used to posture himself as a pugnacious defender of His Players and His Program. With explosive press conferences that aired his grievances with the athletic department, Willard scrapped for a bigger name, image and likeness budget and a higher revenue share in the language of his next contract.

He’ll get those things — but at Villanova.

As recently as a week ago, Willard was all about doing it for Maryland: “It’s not so much about me. I want to make sure that whatever we do going forward we’re successful and we’re successful at the highest rate.”

He’ll fight for those things, but not with the Terps. Turns out it was about him after all.

I’ll give Willard this: Maryland’s athletic department is in a tough place. The football program had a setback season after Mike Locksley’s run of winning records for three years (which might be the Terps’ ceiling). Damon Evans, the man who hired Willard, saw fit to make a break for the deep-pocketed donors at Southern Methodist, also at an embarrassingly inopportune moment. Even before Willard decided to leave, he was due to lose three players from his vaunted starting lineup that got him the furthest he’s ever been in the postseason.

When Willard laid out the reasons he might not return, they sounded reasonable. Who is his boss going to be? How might the department’s priorities change?

“I’m just being honest,” he said. “My honesty got me in trouble, might as well keep getting me in trouble.”

But the “trouble” with Willard’s truth is that it was often selective, and his version of it concealed the open secret that he was entertaining an offer from the Wildcats. It’s especially eye-rolling that Willard accepted the job a week after chiding reporters that they, not he, were making a “pseudo thing” out of his anecdotes that just so happened to reference Villanova.

“You have to cut that shit out,” he said.

There was nothing pseudo about it, of course, and everyone knew it. That is why a handful of his own fans booed him right before the biggest game of the season.

The tone shift by Willard was apparent Wednesday, when he ducked the same questions he embraced with such aplomb the week before — changing topics to the Sweet 16 matchup with the Gators as if he wasn’t the one who cracked open Pandora’s box to start with.

When you posit yourself as the Fearless Truth Teller, you have to tell the truth all the time. Real honesty doesn’t have limits. The truth simply is or it isn’t.

The unsaid truths of his final press conference only showed how shaky his ground at Maryland was at the end. Pointing to deputy athletic director Brian Ullmann, Willard said, “The only person I’ve talked about in my job is with that man over there wearing the muscle hat. He has been absolutely phenomenal. But I’m not even sure if he’s going to be here.”

It couldn’t have escaped Willard that Colleen Sorem, the interim athletic director for Evans, was also in the room wearing a Maryland flag-themed scarf.

The snub hinted at the internal strife Willard has stirred since Evans’ departure. Sorem’s most recent role has been overseeing football and women’s basketball, the programs that Willard would likely be competing with for Maryland’s revenue share if he stayed.

Making the move to Villanova gives Willard no complications of big conference football. Next season, Big East teams will be able to offer basketball players a higher share of revenue than so-called Power Conference schools — maybe millions more. And that gives Willard theoretical access to higher-caliber recruits and more of them.

After dropping so many truth bombs, it would have been thoughtful of Willard to have been ready to reconstruct the wreckage. Instead he leaves the program without its biggest stars, without clear direction and with a whole lot of reputation repair to do. Willard called Maryland “one of the worst, if not lowest, in the NIL in the last two years.” That leaves the school with a hard pitch to bag a new coach with top-tier credentials.

Willard couldn’t handle the heat from the fire he helped set, and turns out he couldn’t handle Florida, either. As was the case at Seton Hall three years ago, a double-digit loss in the NCAA tournament will be the last memory Terps fans will have of him — unless he winds up taking some Maryland players in the portal with him.

An incredible season may amount to no long-term gain for Maryland, maybe even a net loss. It’s a shame and a bitter finish thanks to a man who said he was only being honest. But, after all the posturing that he wanted to make the men’s basketball program better, his inability to shoot straight will ultimately define the memories of his short time in College Park.

The “Crab Five” will be remembered fondly. Their coach, not so much.

As he talked about Julian Reese’s stellar career and season wrapping up in San Francisco, Willard dared to project the future, a dangerous thing for such a slippery coach to do. “We’re going to hang his number one day because of just what he did for this program,” he said.

Someone will. It just won’t be Kevin Willard.