BOSTON -- The narrative has been carefully crafted: a trim, orderly, storybook ascension of a folksy wonder boy with a youthful visage that belied the ample resume he constructed in shockingly quick fashion.

Brad Stevens joined the Boston Celtics with impeccable credentials. He earned them, advancing his basketball career by demonstrating uncommon poise, dignity and maturity for a 37-year old former Division III player.

His college teams at Butler reflected his personality: disciplined, unselfish, with an emphasis on fundamentals and defense. Stevens is a basketball analytics disciple, using cutting-edge statistics to further educate himself on the game he so fervently wishes to master.

According to his mother, Stevens began watching game film at age 6. When he was a 20-something director of basketball operations at Butler, a weighty title that paid a mere $18,000, he spent 14 hours a day logging, categorizing, then editing tapes of defensive tendencies.

"Defense," mused Joe Nixon, his former DePauw College teammate. "Brad never played any defense. He was only interested in scoring."

There it is -- the first chink in the narrative. Brad Steven didn't play defense. Brad Stevens was, ahem, a gunner?

"Let's just say defense wasn't his thing," said his friend Josh Burch, another college teammate.

Stevens has been cast as an unblemished college basketball icon, a throwback Indiana Hoosier who, on his first date with college sweetheart Tracy Wilhelmy, drove her 1 1/2 hours to watch a high school basketball game.

Where did Stevens take his future wife, Tracy, on their first date? A high school basketball game. John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

"I told him it was a bad idea," said Burch. "The joke's on me, I guess. He took her, and she married him."

Burch and Stevens were seniors together, captains and best friends. Stevens exhibited a high basketball IQ, Burch said, but pegging him as a flawless prodigy doesn't begin to explain how Stevens arrived at this pivotal crossroad in his career.

"Everyone says, 'Oh, Brad was destined for coaching,'" Burch said. "Honestly, it's not one of the top 10 things I thought he'd do. It's easy, in hindsight, to glamorize everything he went through.

"But it wasn't fun what happened to us at DePauw."

It certainly wasn't storybook.

The coach of the Boston Celtics wasn't a star, or "a coach on the floor," or a numbers savant. He was a reserve who averaged 5.4 points a game in his final college season, who struggled (and ultimately succeeded) in coming to grips with a reduced role.

"People want me to say Brad came to us with a basketball in one hand and a calculator in the other," said DePauw coach Bill Fenlon. "Honestly, he was just a kid trying to find his way."

Now Stevens must navigate the pitfalls of the NBA, a different beast than the insulated college bubbles of Butler and DePauw. Stevens has invested countless hours studying the pro game, a process that began years ago when former Butler stars Gordon Hayward and Shelvin Mack considered declaring for the NBA draft.

Their coach contacted nearly every general manager in the league for information that would assist him in forecasting his players' chances. One of those calls, to Danny Ainge, spawned a professional relationship that eventually led him to this strange new basketball world, where coaches must prove themselves to players, not the other way around.

"At the beginning of the year, there were some doubts," admitted Celtics veteran Gerald Wallace. "But Brad had a plan, and we saw some potential, so we said, 'Okay, let's try this out.'"

The "audition" of Brad Stevens is in its infancy. While his fan base implores him to follow the rules of tankology -- play hard and lose -- his players suit up every night aiming to win. The results have been mixed, but the effort from the coach has not been.

Gerald Wallace admits the Celtics players weren't initially sold on their new coach until Stevens got them to believe in his plan. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky

"He's invested," Wallace said. "But he's still got some college in him.

"One of the funnier things is when he draws up plays in the huddle during timeouts. He draws them like we have a 35-second clock."

After a rousing career at Zionsville (Ind.) Community High School, when he led the state with 32.3 points a game in sectional play, Stevens received scholarship offers from only one Division 1 program -- Mercer, coached by Bill Hodges, who rode Larry Bird all the way to the national championship game as coach of Indiana State.

Stevens chose Division III DePauw instead. There, he surmised, he could excel in the game he loved while preparing in a competitive academic setting for the inevitable life after basketball.

There were highlights, like his freshman year when he dropped 24 points on Thomas More College. He was second on the team in scoring as a sophomore, but the team posted its first losing season in 15 years. In his junior season the trend continued, and Fenlon knew he needed to make a change. He turned to younger, more talented players on his roster.

Stevens' minutes were reduced, a decision he couldn't fathom. He had already matched his career-high 24 points in a win over North Park that year. In the season opener he had 14 points and 6 boards in 18 minutes. What was so bad about that?

This was not a chink in the narrative. It was a sizable dent.

"The thing we always talk about is walking that line to be able to accept your role in order to be a great teammate," Fenlon said. "You don't have to like it or be satisfied with it, and you should come out every day trying to expand it.

"But, when it's time to be us against them, if you can't accept it, you're a bad teammate. You are pulling us in a direction we don't want to go."

For a very brief moment in his basketball career, Brad Stevens was that guy. He was confused, hurt, and even a little indignant that younger players, who couldn't score like he could, who didn't know the plays like he did, were allowed to make mistakes and eat up his minutes.

"You think it's your turn," Stevens explained. "It's an ego thing. I didn't handle it well as a junior."

For the first time in his life, quitting seemed like a viable option.

"I was about as down about basketball as I've ever been," Stevens said. 'I'd like to say it was just about the losing. I remember thinking, 'Do I want to keep doing this?'"

He had already lined up a job with the pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly after graduation. His future was secure, but it was a future without basketball, a reality that left him strangely uneasy.