It is still two hours before a game in which Kam Chancellor is too hurt to play, but already the Seahawks safety has sweated through his T-shirt and begun to lose his voice. "Get after it. Come on now. Let's go!" he says, shouting motivation at his teammates during the quiet of a pregame stretching drill. His rasps echo in the empty stadium, too loud to ignore, and after a while coach Pete Carroll walks over to join him.

Carroll selected Chancellor in his first draft as Seahawks coach in 2010, and in the seven seasons since, Carroll and others have come to refer to Chancellor as the team's soul. Russell Wilson might be the Seahawks' public face. Richard Sherman might be their most bombastic voice. But on a team that is uniquely built around the fragile chemistry of locker room relationships, Chancellor remains the foundation upon which everything else is built. "When he's good, we're all good, because he's the guy who has everyone's respect," Sherman says.

It is Chancellor whom teammates credit for uniting the locker room on the way to back-to-back Super Bowl appearances. It is Chancellor who now blames himself for disrupting that chemistry last season with his two-game contract holdout, a situation that he says damaged relationships with teammates and compelled him to apologize.

And now, on this Monday night, it is Chancellor who Carroll believes is most capable of igniting the Seahawks for the season's stretch run -- even if he's still hobbled on the sideline in street clothes, about to miss his fourth consecutive game with a groin injury.

"You should speak to the guys before the game tonight," Chancellor would later recall Carroll telling him.

Why? I'm not even playing, Chancellor thought to himself.

Before he can say anything, though, Carroll says: "Doesn't matter. They want to hear you anyway."

For most of his life, Chancellor avoided these pregame speeches. Even as team captain in high school, in college and during his first years in the NFL, he never once spoke in front of an entire team. There was an entire locker room ready to follow him before he was ever ready to lead. He was considered one of the most intense, fearless players in the NFL before he was brave enough to talk in front of a group.

But now, in the moments before a Monday night game against Buffalo, he approaches the team huddle in the center of the locker room. He walks past Carroll and the other coaches who always stand on the outer ring, and then past Wilson and Sherman until he reaches the middle of the circle. One player speaks before each Seahawks game, a rotating core of four or five superstars, but teammates say that Chancellor's speeches feel most akin to a religious chant. He closes his eyes. His muscles tense up. He opens his eyes and looks possessed, demanding eye contact with every player on the team.

"It's a blur of adrenaline," Chancellor will later explain. "I get this crazy look on my face, and you never feel more connected to everyone in that room. It's almost spiritual for me. I think up one or two words or phrases, and then I just go."

This time, the concept he comes up with is about the importance of momentum for a Seahawks team that has managed to remain one of the NFC's best without reaching its full potential. He starts speaking, and pretty soon he is slapping his chest, spit flying everywhere as he spins in a circle so everyone can see him. He's talking about how to begin a postseason run and how one good play can lead to the next, but he might as well be describing his own role on the team.

"One match is a fire starter," he says, and then he is chanting it. "One match. One match. One match! It only takes one to light up the whole box."

His voice is still gravelly and sore from that speech a night later when he walks into a Seattle-area restaurant and orders tea. He's out for the night with his fiancée, Tiffany Luce, and for the past 24 hours they have been celebrating a surreal run of good news. First, Chancellor's speech helped inspire a win over the Bills, and then, after the game, Seahawks doctors medically cleared him to begin practicing again with the team. After that, he took Luce out to dinner at the restaurant where they first met, the place he decided to propose. Now she can't stop staring at the brand-new diamond on her hand, and neither can he.

"This is really happening?" she says.

"This is happening," he says. "It's like everything in my life is all coming together. Family, faith, leadership, football -- everybody keeps telling me they can see my glow. I'm right in the place where I want to be."

He has spent the past day spreading news of his engagement to friends and family in Norfolk, Virginia, reminiscing with them about a time when this kind of self-confidence and contentedness felt far away. The "old Kam," as he calls his younger self, was shy and sometimes insecure while growing up in a housing project in Norfolk, where he was targeted by neighborhood bullies because his skin was too dark, his lips too chapped, his shoes tattered and his cornrows frayed. He also had a single mother whom many knew because of her transportation jobs. She drove a dump truck, delivered a newspaper, drove a bus and ran the trolley -- sometimes working three jobs at once to support six children she was raising alone. "Everything bad people could say about a family that was struggling, I heard it," Chancellor says.

But he was also a natural athlete, and by junior high he had become one of the city's best basketball and football players. He was quiet and disciplined, setting his alarm for 6 a.m. summer workouts, and over time his peers began to credit his success less to ability than to work ethic. He asked a high school basketball coach for keys to the school gym so he could work out at all hours, and pretty soon a few teammates woke up early to join him, and then they became a few dozen, and then it was the entire team.

"Some people lead with advice or with fear, but Kam's the guy everyone wants to be like," says Cornel Parker, his high school coach and mentor. "People are just stepping in line behind him."

That made Chancellor nervous and uncomfortable in high school and in college at Virginia Tech -- "I lost a lot of games because I was too scared of taking control of a team," he says -- and he felt less qualified than ever to lead players in the NFL. He came into the league as a fifth-round pick at safety, but he was too good not to draw attention. He finished first or second in every Seahawks drill. He never took a play off, even in practice. He jumped over linemen to block extra points. He roamed the field with a physical recklessness that teammates admired and opposing receivers feared. After just one NFL season, Carroll asked Chancellor to take over as starting safety and as vocal leader of the defense. But Chancellor demurred. "I told him I wasn't ready for that second part," he says. "I needed to prove myself on the field first and do it by example. You can't force leadership. It has to be natural."

Even after three more seasons, two Pro Bowls, a nod as defensive team captain and a Super Bowl championship, Chancellor had to be forced into a speaking role. Defensive lineman Michael Bennett grabbed him a few moments before a regular-season game against the Cardinals in November 2014. The Seahawks were coming off a loss. Bennett, who frequently gave the speech, sensed the team needed a change.

"You got the speech today?" he asked Chancellor.

"Nah, that's all you," Chancellor said.

"It's not a choice. You're team captain," Bennett insisted, and then he led Chancellor into the locker room and walked him to the center of the circle.