It was powerful when he said it on May 25.

It looms even larger now.

When I interviewed Florida State offensive coordinator Kenny Dillingham as part of our series on how the FSU football team kept moving forward during months of quarantine, I asked him the same question I had asked head coach Mike Norvell and others on the staff:

What was the biggest thing this team missed out on by not having a full month of spring practice?

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I expected most of the coaches to focus on the time they lost installing their offense and defense, and all the reps they missed working on techniques and fundamentals. Or maybe how much they wished they could've seen more from certain players to get a better feel for strengths and weaknesses of their new team.

Those topics were mentioned by all the coaches, among others. But one area that came up several times -- and Dillingham put perfectly into words -- related to a far less tangible, but possibly more important, aspect of the program.

“A big part of building relationships is conflict,” Dillingham said. “And the field, and reps, and getting after people, and coaching … that creates the conflict that’s needed in order to build the relationship and build the trust. So that definitely makes it challenging.”

Think about that for a moment.

One of the reason Florida State's coaches wished they had more spring practice time was so they could have had more conflict.

They wanted more opportunities to push their players and to have them think about pushing back. They wanted to put the young men in more difficult situations to watch them start leaning on each other and maybe even start reaching out to others for help.

That wanted that because they knew it was the best way to build the trust needed to succeed on Saturdays in the fall.

As it turns out, it would be needed on Thursdays in early June and mid-August as well.

I reflected on the comments by Dillingham and other FSU coaches when star defensive tackle Marvin Wilson went on a Twitter rant directed at Norvell back on June 4. What was perhaps most disconcerting about that saga wasn't the fact that Norvell misspoke or that Wilson got irritated; it was that the defensive tackle didn't reach out to ask his head coach for any type of clarification.

He just went straight to social media.

Perhaps Norvell wasn't as surprised as we were. Less than two weeks earlier, during a May 22 interview, he told me he was concerned about the impact the quarantine might have on his team's chemistry and also recruiting.

“Developing relationships is built on time,” he said.

At that point, the Seminoles' coaches had been physically separated from their players for more than two months. It would be nearly two more months before the players and coaches could come together regularly for mandatory meetings and conditioning drills.

“We spent as much time away from them as we were with them,” defensive coordinator Adam Fuller told me earlier this summer. “And there is no replacement in relationships for time.”