Liane Christensen, whose sons, Wes and Will, grew up playing with the Rodgers boys, knew Rodgers had a gift the first time he stood in front of the Christensens’ three-story house and threw a football over the roof and into the backyard pool.

“I never worried about him breaking a window,” she said, “because he was always so darn accurate.”

An old friend of Ed Rodgers attended one of Rodgers’s sporting events and told Aaron afterward, “You’re a really good player.” As Ed Rodgers recalled: “Aaron was like: ‘Yeah, but you should see my brother. He’s better.’ The gentleman turned to me and said, ‘You know, that response is really rare.’ ”

So was Rodgers’s answer to a question posed to him during the admittance interview for Champion Christian, where he attended eighth grade. The principal said, “Tell me one thing you can do to make the school better,” and Rodgers, according to his father, replied, “Your sports teams are going to be really good.”

His father added, “Aaron has always had this interesting combination of being really humble and extremely confident.”

It is a strange mix, like the cooling air masses and warming water vapors that cause the fog that last week sat atop the valley like foam on a cappuccino. It was so thick, Chico seemed to disappear in the mist.

Coming out of high school, Rodgers and other athletes have talked about feeling invisible, not without good reason. A decade ago, on a flight from Phoenix to Sacramento, Rodgers’s father struck up a conversation with his seatmate, an assistant at Arizona State who was on a recruiting trip.