When I asked Pat for his own assessment of his play, he just shrugged.

“It’s hard to get a good measure,” he said. “You don’t hear anything about the good stuff. That’s just the way it is here.”

At the following practice, Pat got the promised reps with the Ones. It was always easy to tell when just the Threes were on the field. You couldn’t hear anything. Everybody was unsure of what they were doing, and so nobody talked. Now the vets were giving Pat his checks, he was chattering back to them, and, with the doors to his mind’s playbook-cage flung open, he was looking again like the guy in his own highlight reel; briefly playing in that realm of informed thoughtlessness that had turned scouts’ heads in the first place.

Driving his gray pickup back home in Geneva during a break a few weeks after the close of minicamp, Pat popped in a CD. He wanted me to hear the motivational music he listens to before games or personal workout sessions like the one we were driving to that July morning at the ProForce training facility in Batavia, the adjacent town. He still had another couple of weeks off before the start of padded, preseason camp at the end of July. But on the verge of his first and perhaps only crack at the N.F.L., he had no intention of relaxing. He reached over and ramped up the volume, his pickup trembling now as soaring chords and tribal chants swirled above the same slow, propulsive backbeat.

“O.K., don’t laugh,” he said. “But when I’m listening to this, I imagine myself running through a primeval forest somewhere with just a loincloth on and a huge hunting knife in my mouth. I’m really looking to kill something.”

I often found myself trying to construct some kind of half-baked genealogy of Pat Schiller’s athletic prowess, his possible pigskin pedigree. His paternal grandfather, Eddie Schiller, a k a the Blond Tiger, was a boxer in the late 1920s and early ’30s who fought, for a time, out of Kid Howard’s downtown Chicago gym. Pat’s father told me he was kept from the gridiron by his mother to preserve his fingers for the keyboard. On my sister’s side, there was my mother’s brother, my uncle Carl Valle, a 6-foot-2, 240-pound all-city lineman at James Madison High School in Brooklyn who went on to play two seasons at Boston College. Carl’s equivalently proportioned nephew, my cousin Ralph, knocked about as an offensive lineman in the semipros back in the 1960s, playing for the Brooklyn Mariners and the Long Island Bulls, the New York Giants’ former farm team, briefly making the Giants’ taxi squad in 1968 and 1969. And then there was my older brother Bob, a linebacker and offensive guard at Archbishop Stepinac High School, in White Plains. He went on to play at Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. But the combination of an outsize will in a somewhat plodding, too-small frame led to so many concussions that he walked away before the start of his sophomore season.

Bob shaped my own football career. The summer of his sophomore year, appalled that I was still riding the bench as a wannabe fullback after my second season at Ossining High, he took matters into his own hands. Every day before dinner that summer, he put a helmet on my head, dragged me into the backyard, put me in the proper three-point guard stance and had me charge on his count into his bare, upward-flailing forearm. We did this until my face bled. We did it until I learned to get my face mask into his chest faster than his forearm could get to my face. I never sat on the bench again. By the end of two varsity seasons with only one loss, individual all-league honors and a late growth spurt that took me to 6 feet tall and 205 pounds, the college recruiters came calling. Mostly smaller schools like Bates, Colby and Colgate. Lehigh treated me to a New York Giants game. Brown had me up to Providence one weekend to meet with coaches and party all night with some players in their dorm.

Still, I knew I wasn’t going any farther with football. Even on game days, I always felt that I had one foot outside the experience. During pregame psyche drills with my friend, Mike Chernick — a standout fullback and middle linebacker who went on to play at Yale — the two of us would be on the sidelines, pounding on each other’s shoulder pads, growling. Occasionally I looked up and saw the wild whites of his eyes and thought, He really means this.