Ed Orgeron’s farewell tour begins at Ole Miss of all places.

Orgeron’s first game as LSU’s lame-duck coach comes Saturday afternoon in Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, where Orgeron began his head-coaching career.

He had a failed 3-year tenure with the Rebels, but he learned lessons that ultimately helped him land his dream job with the Tigers.

Orgeron wanted to finish this season – even after LSU decided last week that it would be his last.

He wants to savor each day of the few remaining weeks he has left on the job he always wanted and soon will no longer have.

It was 5 years ago that Orgeron improbably ascended to his dream job and that time has flown by.

Perhaps these final weeks will move a bit more slowly – and Orgeron can periodically reflect less on the fact that his dream job is going away and more on the fact that it really was like a dream for much of the time.

It’s fitting that this final run starts in Oxford.

The No. 1 lesson Orgeron learned from his time with the Rebels was that a head coach can’t be as hands-on as a position coach. He has to hire good coaches and trust them to do their jobs.

He remembered that when he hired Joe Brady, trusted him to do his job and the Tigers rolled to the 2019 national championship.

Orgeron might even look across the field Saturday and wonder if Rebels coach Lane Kiffin – a friend, former co-worker and former boss of Orgeron’s – might wind up being his successor.

Next stop: Bryant-Denny Stadium for Orgeron’s final SEC road game.

Orgeron has operated in the shadow of former Tigers and current Tide head coach Nick Saban. He endured the latter stages of a painfully disappointing 8-game losing streak to Bama and famously said “We’re coming” after a 24-10 road loss to the Tide in 2017.

Two years later Orgeron’s program arrived, knocking off Bama in Bryant-Denny on its way to that championship.

But Orgeron’s program didn’t have the staying power that Saban’s has had and the Tide blasted the Tigers 55-17 last season.

Next up is Arkansas and Orgeron might get a little sentimental about the place where he coached for 2 seasons in his first full-time position as an assistant strength and conditioning coach.

Then comes Louisiana Tech.

If LSU can beat the Bulldogs in presumably the only remaining game in which it will be favored, the Tigers would need just 1 upset in their final 4 SEC games to become bowl eligible.

Orgeron said without hesitation Sunday that he would coach LSU in a bowl game if the Tigers get there.

Perhaps the Tigers will already have that upset in their pocket – presumably not against Alabama but perhaps against Arkansas or even Ole Miss.

If not Orgeron will have one more crack at it in the season finale.

Orgeron’s last game as LSU head coach in Tiger Stadium will be against Texas A&M.

There’s a lot to unpack here between the Tigers and the Aggies and Orgeron.

LSU was on the verge of firing Miles when it played A&M in Tiger Stadium at the end of the 2015 season.

Had Miles been fired, Jimbo Fisher might well have been the LSU coach in 2016, leaving Florida State and presumably never winding up with the Aggies.

In any event, if Miles had been fired, then it’s difficult to imagine any scenario in which Orgeron would have become LSU’s head coach.

But LSU rose up for Miles and knocked off A&M – not unlike how Orgeron’s Tigers rose up last week and knocked off Florida – and Miles survived long enough to start the next season 2-2, opening the door for Orgeron.

That’s worth reflecting on.

Orgeron also might reflect on that cold and premature Gatorade bath he got in the final seconds of the fourth quarter at Kyle Field on Thanksgiving weekend in 2018.

He’ll remember a last-minute Tigers interception of Kellen Mond being overturned on replay, the Aggies tying the score as time expired and 7 overtimes later A&M prevailing in a bizarre, bitter loss to Fisher’s Aggies that will live in infamy around LSU.

One year later, the Tigers got payback in the form of a 50-7 victory in Joe Burrow’s final home game, when he ran through the tunnel onto the field with Burreaux on the back of his jersey – a sentimental thank you to the LSU fans before heading off to whip Georgia for the SEC championship, then Oklahoma and Clemson to bring home LSU’s fourth national championship.

The championships that coach Orgeron brought to his home state.

Orgeron will remember Burrow’s last night in Tiger Stadium – and that night 44 days later and some 80 miles away in the Superdome when he hoisted the championship trophy.

LSU had climbed the college football summit with Orgeron as its sherpa.

But shortly thereafter the descent from the summit began. It was sudden and more rapid than anyone could have foreseen.

And now Orgeron’s tenure at his dream job is coming to an end.

The sequence of events that placed him in that job was improbable.

The 2019 run was magical.

Maybe there’s a little magic left in Orgeron’s run.

Perhaps that victory against Florida last week was a launching point for another memorable run to close out his tenure on a positive note.

Perhaps his final Tigers team wins another couple games or more and they go to that bowl game he sounded so eager to coach in.

But this story shouldn’t end in some non-descript bowl game somewhere in Florida or Georgia or Texas in late December.

Ed Orgeron’s last game as LSU head coach should be played in Louisiana.

In Tiger Stadium.

On a Saturday night.