Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown sits down with Hannah Storm to discuss his difficult upbringing in Miami, his relationship with his father, and his four young children. (1:58)

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AT FIRST, IT looks like so many other drives. On Oct. 18, the Colts are down by three to the Patriots late in the second quarter and Andrew Luck is marching his offense down the field. The team lines up near the goal line, with wide receiver T.Y. Hilton -- Luck's favorite target -- hovering to the quarterback's right. After shaking off his defender, Hilton spins to the outside, then swerves back into traffic. Luck sidearms a dart to the slender receiver, who slides into the end zone for a touchdown.

Hilton jumps up and turns to face the crowd. Colts fans wait for his celebration -- normally he'll lift his arms and form a T and a Y. But this time he does something unexpected: He starts dancing. Hilton places one hand on his stomach and raises the other to the sky, wiggles his hips, then switches hands. No one knows what is going on.

No one except for Antonio Brown. The Steelers wide receiver, who is watching the prime-time game from his sofa in Pittsburgh, jumps up and bursts out laughing. He immediately recognizes his own dance.

After his Week 6 TD vs. the Patriots, Hilton mirrored Brown's end zone dance. John Minchillo/AP Images

THREE DAYS LATER, Cora Hilton is sitting in a lawn chair in Gwen Cherry Park, just outside Miami, watching her husband, Tyrone, try to teach a group of 8-year-olds how to run a pass play. When she stands up, an older man walks over, wordlessly places a crumpled-up piece of paper in her hand and shuffles away. She unfolds it to find a newspaper clipping about the Colts-Patriots game that mentions her son, now 26. "He's been doing that for years," she says of the neighbor.

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T.Y. and Antonio grew up here, playing for Tyrone at different ages. Both possessed ungodly speed, the kind that made other children flail in their wake, crashing like tiny waves. "They were shifty," Tyrone says. "It was hard to bring them down, hard to catch up with them." Though they never played on the same team -- Brown was a year older and in a different weight class -- the two kids were identical players: smaller, shrewder and more gifted than their peers. It was only at night, when the park closed and the boys went home, that their lives diverged.

Brown's father, also a coach, lived in a different part of the country. Tyrone hesitates to say much more. "You never know the background or the family that you're dealing with," he says.

Gwen Cherry Park is tucked near the edge of Liberty City, a lower-income neighborhood in northwest Miami that gave rise to Chad Johnson and Santana Moss; Amari Cooper, Devonta Freeman, Lavonte David and Teddy Bridgewater are also from here. Every Saturday, the park fills with dozens of boys, their families setting up tents and frying conch before football games. Grandmothers walk the fields in T-shirts with their grandsons' faces printed on them; high school coaches scout from the sidelines; grown men bet on games between children.

Cora says her son was a quiet kid -- so shy, she says, that when he was a toddler and his parents got married, he was afraid to carry the ring down the aisle by himself. He was gentle-hearted, the sort of boy who loved video games and would tuck his head into his chest like a turtle if you yelled at him too loudly. Brown, on the other hand, was confident and charismatic, constantly demanding the ball, says Tyrone, laughing. "He'd say, 'Coach, I can play quarterback too! I was wide open, Coach!'"

Like most of the coaches in Gwen Cherry Park, Tyrone played football in high school. He was a star wide receiver, undersized at 5-foot-6 but nimble enough to draw interest from colleges. Tennessee offered him a scholarship, he says, but he didn't want to leave his family and his church in Liberty City, so he turned it down. Three years later, he was married with a job as a hospital orderly and had the first of four children. "Everything happens for a reason," he says.

Tyrone and Cora have lived at the same address for 25 years, in a cozy, periwinkle blue house not far from the park. The walls are plastered with so many photographs, medals and framed jerseys that the rooms have a shrinelike quality; T.Y.'s peewee gloves are arranged like sacred objects. For his childhood teammates, the house was a refuge -- a place where they could sleep over before games, curling up on every possible surface. "Other kids wished they were their parents," T.Y. says.

These days, the rooms are still packed with children on Friday nights. Cora still cooks everyone breakfast, and Tyrone still drives his players to the field, or anywhere else they need to go. "It's more than football," he explains. It's community, persistence and patience -- and sometimes it's loss. Three of his players have been murdered, he says. He tries his best to keep track of the kids, but sometimes they vanish, like they've been swallowed up by the tide.

That's what happened with Brown, Tyrone says. "When he left the park, he disappeared."

T.Y. Hilton and his dad, Tyrone. Courtesy Hilton Family

FOR ALL THE NFL players to emerge from Liberty City, one of the neighborhood's most promising talents -- a boy so fast people called him Rabbit -- never made it to the league. Eddie Brown, the dimpled star of Miami Central High, was 18 years old when his first son, Antonio, was born. A year later, he left to play wide receiver for Louisiana Tech. The baby and his mother, Adrianne, stayed behind.

After he failed to catch on with the Arizona Cardinals, Eddie joined the Albany Firebirds of the Arena Football League, scoring six touchdowns in his first game. By then, he and Adrianne had broken up. In 1996, 8-year-old Antonio and his younger brother, Desmond, went to spend a few months with their dad in Albany, where Eddie also coached high school ball. The boys loved it there; Antonio spent hours running on the Firebirds' field with his father, who would go on to score 303 touchdowns. (In 2006, he was voted the greatest player in Arena Football history.) At the end of the school year, Eddie put his sons on a plane back to Miami.

It would be years before they saw their father again.

Antonio grew up about a mile from T.Y., but he might as well have lived on a different planet. One of his earliest memories, he says, was watching a man steal a purse from his elementary school teacher, dashing away as the shocked students looked on. As Antonio grew older, several of his friends joined the John Doe Gang, which controlled the crack cocaine trade in Liberty City. "Every party I went to ended in a shootout," Brown says. Football offered escape, but only to an extent. "When I came to play, Coach Tyrone would be like, 'What's wrong?' And it wasn't like I could tell him what was going on at home," he says.

At 16, he had a falling-out with his mother's new husband and left their house. Over the next few months, he bounced among friends' sofas, sometimes sleeping in cars. If he could scrounge up the money, he'd stay in a cheap hotel room -- anywhere he could get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. "He was living a grown man's life," says Nigel Dunn, his high school coach at Miami Norland.

Brown played quarterback, and he was good, Dunn says -- so good a local quarterback named Geno Smith decided not to enroll at Norland. Brown was just 5-10 but so athletic that several big universities, including Michigan State and Clemson, were interested in him as a receiver. One young coach, an assistant at Bowling Green named Zach Azzanni, says he conducted his recruiting visit with Brown on the street. "I literally met him on the corner," Azzanni says. Brown stood next to his bike, he says. He had nowhere else to go.

In the end, Brown's grades were too low for the big universities. He thought he could play for Alcorn State in Mississippi, but once he arrived, he learned that he was ineligible there too. So he packed a bag and took a Greyhound for 19 hours to a postgrad prep school in North Carolina. He doesn't remember a whole lot from the trip, aside from the sight of just-released prisoners getting on and off the bus.

After one season at NC Tech, Brown landed a scholarship to Florida International University in Miami, home to a small D1 program.

Then one night in February 2007, before he officially joined the team, he was walking on campus with a friend, who got into a dispute with another student. When security arrived, another argument broke out, this time including Brown, who panicked and fled. When FIU found out, the school rescinded his scholarship.

Brown was devastated: "They said ... we're gonna say you were never here."

A YEAR LATER, Hilton, then a senior in high school, was sitting on a bed in his parents' house, staring at two hats. One said West Virginia; the other had an FIU logo on it. After saying a prayer, he gingerly placed his infant son, Quis, on the blanket. The baby scooted toward the FIU cap. "Once he crawled to it eight times, I said: 'It's meant for me to go there,'" Hilton recalls.

When he enrolled at FIU in 2008, he had no idea how close he had come to reuniting with Brown. The boys had lost touch years ago, when Brown outgrew the park. In the meantime, Hilton had thrived as a receiver at Miami Springs High, scoring 20 touchdowns as a senior. Urban Meyer wanted him at Florida, and West Virginia rolled out the red carpet. FIU, on the other hand, was a new program that had just gone 0 -- 12 and 1 -- 11.

In the end, it came down to Quis, for less whimsical reasons than his taste in hats. Unlike Brown, Hilton didn't want to leave Liberty City. It was his home -- a place where he felt safe and loved, where his parents were helping his girlfriend of five years, Shantrell, raise their son. "His family was always there, at every single game," says Frank Ponce, FIU's receivers coach at the time.

It didn't take long for FIU to start winning -- and for the young receiver, at 5-9 still one of the smallest players on the field, to become a local celebrity. The stadium filled up with fans wearing No. 4 jerseys and screaming "Goodbye, T.Y.!" as he galloped past defenses. Eventually, NFL scouts started to show up too, and they were blown away by his speed and football smarts. "He watched a lot of film, and he understood how the defense was structured -- how they would cover him," Ponce says. "He had a mental gift for the game."

It was during one of those film sessions that Hilton made a surprising discovery. He was studying a matchup between Troy, one of FIU's conference rivals, and Central Michigan, another small D1 program. As the game droned on, he was startled when he heard a familiar name on CMU's roster, one he hadn't thought about in a long time. "I was like -- 'Is that AB?'"

Brown's 79 catches and 1,141 receiving yards are both second most in the NFL this season. Peter Yang for ESPN

NOT LONG AFTER Brown lost his spot at FIU, he received a call from an old acquaintance, Azzanni. Now an assistant at Central Michigan, Azzanni had a proposal: Fly to Mount Pleasant and walk on to the team as a receiver -- a scholarship could open up. Days later, Brown showed up at CMU's football field and introduced himself to the team's head coach, Butch Jones. At the time, Brown had never actually played wide receiver, and he weighed about 160 pounds; he didn't own winter clothes.

Jones, now the coach at Tennessee, was skeptical. He sat Brown in the team's first game, against Kansas. As the clock ticked, the young man kept tugging on Jones' shirt and demanding a shot, much as he did with Tyrone back in Gwen Cherry Park. Finally, Jones put him in, telling his quarterback to pitch Brown the ball on a reverse so he wouldn't have to run a route. Brown smoked the defense for a first down, only to be blasted by a linebacker afterward. He popped right up. "He comes out of the game, looks me in the eye and says, 'See! I told you!'" Jones says with a laugh.

Brown picked up the position quickly, Jones says. It was the off-the-field stuff that took longer to sink in -- showing up at meetings, finishing his homework, getting to class on time. Azzanni and his wife, Julia, spent hours helping Brown adjust to college life, and eventually he became part of their family. "I would come home at night and he would be sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework," Azzanni says.

Soon, Brown was thriving, easily passing his classes and putting up 100-yard games. His profile grew; NFL teams took notice, including Pittsburgh, which would later draft him in the sixth round. He made new friends. "In Miami, you don't trust a lot of people -- you can't be friendly or open up," he says. In Mount Pleasant, on the other hand, people were warm; they asked each other how they were doing, and they actually meant it. "I loved it," Brown says. Fifteen hundred miles from Liberty City, deep in the rural heart of Michigan, he felt like he was home.

That was around the time his father showed up.

T.Y. AND SHANTRELL live outside Indianapolis in a small, quiet suburb on a street lined with small, quiet houses. Inside their home, signs of their three young children are everywhere: homework splayed across the counter, toys on the floor, enough cereal boxes to feed a small army. Hilton plops onto the sofa, and his kids immediately tumble into the room. Tyrone Jr., who is 3, runs up to his father and shows him his pajamas, which are covered with cartoon dogs. "They're not gonna bite," he sings before sprinting away.

Hilton lets out a long, satisfied sigh. "It's all day," he says.

He remembers his first time visiting Indiana, flying over the cornfields on his way to meet the Colts, pondering a life in the wintry Midwest. He had torn his quad in his final college game, and he feared his draft stock would sink. But he took comfort in the success of another undersized receiver. By 2012, Brown was flourishing in the NFL. Though Hilton hadn't spoken with him in years, he'd kept an eye on his old friend ever since he spotted him at CMU. "I remember watching him and thinking, 'That could be me,'" Hilton says. "He made it easier."

The Colts took Hilton in the third round, and he quickly became a solid starter; by 2013, he was a star. Hilton's reputation as a top receiver was cemented in the playoffs that season, when he scored two touchdowns in a comeback win over the Chiefs, racking up 224 yards.

And yet, that wasn't even his most memorable game. On Nov. 23, 2014, Shantrell went into labor in the middle of the night, hours before the Colts were slated to play the Jaguars at home. Hilton's manager woke him up at the team hotel around 5 a.m., and they drove to the hospital. Later that morning, after Eugenia was born, T.Y. asked Shantrell whether she wanted him to stay in the delivery room. "She was like, 'Boy, you better go play,'" he says.

That afternoon, when Hilton scored a game-sealing touchdown, he celebrated by holding the football like a baby, gently rocking it in his arms. When a reporter asked him about the gesture afterward, he broke down into tears on camera, succumbing to the fatigue and emotion of the previous 12 hours. "I couldn't stop crying," he says. "I had just had a baby girl, which was something I always wanted, and then going out there and playing the game that I love for her" -- his voice cracks a little.

Back in his home, as Hilton finishes recounting the story, his two sons tiptoe into the room. They want to practice running routes. Their father says yes, so they line up in the doorway, taking turns making leaping catches. Quis is a wide receiver, and every offseason he plays in Gwen Cherry Park. "I can't wait to retire and just go to his games -- see the game through him," Hilton says.

As he raises his kids, he often thinks of his own dad, the man who taught him so much about sacrifice and grace. Growing up, he didn't know that Tyrone was a football star; he found out from his coaches at Miami Springs. "They told me: 'Your daddy was a baller. Your daddy was the man.'"

Brown and Hilton celebrate a TD at last season's Pro Bowl. Brown had 129 catches on his way to Arizona, Hilton 82. Mark Humphrey/AP Images

IT'S A MUGGY afternoon in late October, and Eddie Brown is standing on the Boyd Anderson High School football field in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, watching his team run drills. After retiring from the Arena Football League in 2003, Brown coached at various high schools and community colleges in the Midwest before moving back to Miami last year. At 5-11, he's a bit taller and broader than Antonio, but the resemblance is otherwise uncanny: same crinkly eyes, same self-assured grin, same slightly bowlegged walk.

"Don't you think Antonio looks like me?" he asks. "I'm the father."

He says he first heard in 2007 that Antonio had landed at Central Michigan from a high school friend named Gerry Burnett, who happens to be Cora Hilton's brother. He looked up CMU's schedule and saw that the team was playing Purdue, just an hour's drive from his home in Indianapolis. So he hunkered in the stands and watched his son pick up more than 100 total yards, more than any other receiver on the team. "I was like, 'Damn, that's my boy,'" he says.

That October, he drove to Ball State and saw Antonio score twice. This time, he worked up the courage to approach his son after the game. Antonio, clearly stunned, "kinda said hello," according to his father -- and then walked away. A few weeks later, Eddie attended another game, at Western Michigan. When Antonio's team ran to the locker room, Eddie stood next to the exit, hoping for another encounter. "He looked, did a double take and then kept going," he says.

Eddie doesn't remember when, exactly, Antonio finally agreed to talk that fall. They spoke on the phone first. He recalls awkward conversations and long silences, a tense détente that was finally punctured during a confrontation in a hotel room in Detroit, where CMU was playing in the Motor City Bowl. His son roared at him, Eddie says, screaming through tears. "'Do you know what the f--- I've been through? Did you know I've been on the streets?'"

He did. All of those years, Eddie says, he was watching from afar -- keeping tabs on Antonio's football career through friends from home, sitting quietly in the bleachers at his high school games when he was back in town. He says he stayed away because of friction with his ex-wife and her new husband. (Antonio's mother, Adrianne, didn't respond to a request for an interview.) But he admits that, regardless of his reason, it was the wrong choice. "I still struggle with it today," he says.

Eddie's own father, a basketball star, had him in high school too. He also left his child to pursue his dream. Eddie grew up barely knowing him, and they never hashed out their differences before he died. "History has repeated itself," he says. When he reunited with Antonio, who himself had just become a father, Eddie asked for a second chance. "I stressed to him you have to break the cycle," he says.

Antonio Brown and his father, Eddie, at Boyd Anderson High School in Lauderdale Lakes, Fla., where Eddie coaches. Courtesy Eddie Brown

DURING THE SUMMER of Hilton's rookie year in 2012, the Colts flew to Pittsburgh for a preseason game, and Hilton and Brown met on a football field for the first time in over a decade. Brown was coming off a breakout 69-catch season and had just signed a $42.5 million extension.

It felt like they were kids again, Hilton says. "He said, 'Let me see what you got. You know I'm gonna put on a show for you.'" Since then, the two have stayed in touch, texting each other messages of encouragement. Hilton says he studies tape of Brown. "He's the only guy I have on my iPad," he says. "I watch him because of our relationship, and because if I had to compare myself to one receiver, I'd say it's him."

This past January, both players were selected for the Pro Bowl, and Brown, a captain of Cris Carter's team, made sure his side picked Hilton. "Two guys with the same aspirations, who love football and come from the same neighborhood -- it was special," Hilton says. When he scored in the first quarter, Brown stood next to him in the end zone, lifting his arms to form a Y next to his friend's T. It was then, Hilton says, that he came up with the idea to pay homage to Brown this fall.

After his dance in the end zone of the Patriots game, Hilton received a text: Man you put a smile in my heart.

About a week later, Brown is eating dinner at a steakhouse in downtown Pittsburgh, not far from Heinz Field. Dressed in a wool and leather coat with sparkling jewelry, his hair terraced into a tiny Mayan pyramid, he's as colorful as Hilton is demure. His mother is flying in for this weekend's game; it will be her first time seeing him play in Pittsburgh. When asked whether he's excited, Brown deflects. "She's excited."

He says that he's on good terms with both of his parents and that he's forgiven his father. "You never know what he went through, what his side of the story was," he says. He insists that he's moved on. He uses the deliberate language of survivors, filling the blank spaces in his story with affirmations about blessings and opportunities and growth. He uses the word "positive" more than once. It's only when he talks about Gwen Cherry Park -- about the differences between him and Hilton, and the vast gulf that separated them as children -- that he acknowledges his pain. "He came to the park and played without worries," Brown says. "Me? I came to the park and played -- but sometimes I played mad."

And yet, despite all of that, here they are: two men who grew up together, went their separate ways and somehow ended up in the same place. Two fathers. In a few weeks, Brown's eldest son is turning 8. He plays football, but Brown isn't sure how long he'll stick with the sport. His four kids, all of whom live with him, are largely oblivious to his exploits on the field. They don't know what football represents in his life.

"They don't care what I do," Brown says. "They just care that I'm their dad."