If you’re waiting for a reunion of the last Trail Blazers team that truly contended for an NBA title, it probably won’t be in Portland.

“Most of those guys that were on those teams,” Damon Stoudamire told me last week, “they don’t really feel no connection to Portland because everybody feels like they just tried to erase our history.”

That history?

It’s complicated, as you know. A string of successful seasons against a backdrop of off-the-court misdeeds. The Blazers have never really seemed to know what to do with that.

As the most impactful homegrown Blazer in the team’s history, it clearly still bothers Stoudamire, who grew up in Northeast Portland and attended what is now Ida B. Wells High School.

But if you’d like to see the early 2000s Blazers get back together, you might want to hang out around Georgia Tech basketball.

Last spring, Stoudamire was hired as the Yellow Jackets head coach. And it turned into a reunion.

“Bonzi Wells is on my staff,” Stoudamire said.

And: “Rasheed (Wallace) comes to a lot of my practices.”

And: “Steve Smith comes to our games.”

Greg Anthony, who works for Turner Sports in Atlanta, is also around.

So, if you’re keeping track, that’s three starters and two key reserves from the 2000 team and the infamous Game 7 loss against the Lakers whom you might find in the same gym on a given day.

“We all still hang,” Stoudamire said. “That Portland team has always stayed together.”

Wells previously coached at Division II LeMoyne-Owen College in Tennessee. And Wallace makes trips to Atlanta from his home in North Carolina.

History has softened the view of the 2000 Blazers and their troubles. Stoudamire’s offenses involved marijuana, which is now legal. Wallace has recently opened up about a variety of issues relating to his Blazers tenure, including the behind-the-scenes story of Zach Randolph punching Ruben Patterson. Last year, Wallace and Wells narrated a short documentary about the era in which they lamented their treatment in Portland.

“We brought some of that (stuff) on ourselves,” Stoudamire said. “Some of it was warranted. We’re not going to sit up here and act like some of it wasn’t warranted, but the overreaction to what was going on based on everybody wanting us to be like the Blazer teams of old, well that wasn’t who we were.”

February will mark 20 years since Wallace was traded from Portland, signaling the end of that era. Stoudamire left a year later in free agency.

Two decades? It’s hard to believe.

I had to look again when I saw that Stoudamire, the Portland kid, turned 50 this year.

Before my conversation with Stoudamire veered into a Blazers retrospective, we were discussing his early success at Georgia Tech.

After losing early to UMass Lowell and being on the wrong side of a blowout against Cincinnati, the Jackets responded with wins over a pair of ranked programs.

Beating No. 21 Mississippi State was impressive. But it was the 72-68 win over then-No. 7 Duke on Dec. 2 that turned heads. When the teams last met in January, Duke won 86-43.

“Like I tell them every day,” Stoudamire said of his team, “with the way things are going, you raise the bar, you change the trajectory of where we’re trying to go, and so your standard has to be higher for yourselves individually and as a group.”

Stoudamire is trying to resurrect a former ACC power. This week, Georgia Tech will play in the Diamondhead Classic in Honolulu, where they could match up against the Portland Pilots in their second game, giving the cross-continental Stoudamire a link to his hometown.

Stoudamire is 6-3 so far at Tech. He won 48% of his games in five seasons as the head coach at Pacific of the West Coast Conference, including a 23-10 season in 2019-20.

In 2021, Stoudamire joined the Boston Celtics as an assistant coach on fellow Portlander Ime Udoka’s coaching staff. He thought he was content to serve as an NBA assistant until Joe Mazzulla, who replaced Udoka as the Celtics head coach last season, missed two games with an eye injury.

Stoudamire served as interim coach in wins against Houston and the Los Angeles Clippers.

“When Joe couldn’t coach for those couple games, and I got a chance to be head coach,” he said, “it got my itch going.”

He was hired in March to replace Josh Pastner, who Stoudamire worked for at the University of Memphis a decade earlier.

Stoudamire’s connections to Portland have waned over the years. Much of his family is still in town, but he sold his home there while coaching at Pacific, which, he said, “kind of made it official.”

He follows the Blazers at a distance and even less so since knowing the ins and outs of the NBA stopped being his job earlier this year. Asked about the team trading Damian Lillard, he said, “You could see it coming. When you know the business, the business of it is, I’m going to go ahead and get my extension and when I get my extension y’all got to move me.”

He hopes the Blazers give their young core a chance to grow together.

“See if Scoot, or Simons, if they are going to be the next Dame,” he said. “You gave Dame the ball. Nobody knew Damian Lillard was going to be Damian Lillard.”

While this new group of Blazers attempts to chart a future toward contention, a group of their predecessors will periodically convene on the other side of the country, bonded by Stoudamire’s Georgia Tech team.

And while the relationship is complicated, Stoudamire still hopes for good things for his hometown team.

“The city of Portland needs the Blazers,” he said. “Portland needs the Blazers to be successful. And so, I pull for Portland from that standpoint, because I know that when the Blazers are winning, I know what that looks like.”