Seven months after No. 1 seed Purdue suffered a loss to 16-seed Fairleigh Dickinson in the NCAA tournament, coach Matt Painter said the defeat still bothers him.

The loss was just the second time in NCAA tournament history that a 16-seed had lost to a 1-seed following Virginia‘s loss to UMBC in 2018.

“I don’t think it will stay with me through the year,” Painter said during Big Ten media day in Minneapolis on Tuesday. “I think it will stay with me forever. I wish it didn’t, but I think that’s part of being competitive. I think that’s part of coaching.”

The loss also came a year after Purdue (3-seed) had lost to Saint Peter‘s (15-seed) in the 2022 NCAA tournament.

But Purdue is set to compete for the national title again with the return of Zach Edey, the 7-foot-4 star who has a chance to become the second player to win the Wooden Award twice 40 years after Ralph Sampson Jr. achieved the feat at Virginia. The Boilermakers should be a top-five team in every reputable preseason poll in America. They’re ranked third in ESPN’s Way-Too-Early Top 25 poll.

Painter said he understands the criticism about last year’s NCAA tournament exit and told his team to accept last year’s result without running from it.

“You don’t sit around and shine your trophies,” Painter said. “You sit around and wonder why in the hell you couldn’t beat somebody 17 years ago on a cold Wednesday night. But for us it’s part of a process. It’s part of getting out there and putting yourself in a great position. I think we’ve had a lot of pushback, so I tell our guys about that. You have to understand that some of that pushback is true and you have to embrace that. We have lost to some people where we’ve been the better seed in the NCAA tournament here in the past four or five years. … I always say I’m the common denominator. Our staff is. We have to be able to make some adjustments and do some different things.”