It reads like a Hollywood script: Aging athlete won’t say die, travels the world to hone his game, then returns to where it all started to prove himself like he hadn’t before.

And Matt Murton is now facing the climax, his moment of truth. The journeyman is trying to etch one of baseball’s best comeback stories in Detroit. But if this is a movie, no one’s watching. There are Tigers who have no idea of his existence.

“I was having a conversation with one of the guys in the outfield yesterday,” Murton said Thursday over the phone, from spring training in Lakeland, Fla. “I was talking to him, I realized he thought I had just been drafted. I looked at him, I said, ‘How old do you think I am?’ He took a step back, didn’t know how to answer that. I said, ‘Listen, man, there’s no wrong answer here. Seriously, how old do you think I am?’ He said, ‘Early 20s?’

“I said, ‘Bro, you’re my best friend. I’m 35 years old.’ And he said, ‘No, you’re not.’ I had to continue to repeat it to him.”

Matt Murton is a 35-year-old ball of energy, a baseball lifer who’s stretching that life to the limit. He was a first-round pick of the Red Sox in the 2003 draft — when the Mets grabbed Lastings Milledge and the Yankees took Eric Duncan. Murton was dealt to the Cubs as part of the blockbuster Nomar Garciaparra deal in 2004, and made his major league debut in 2005. He spent a couple seasons as a starter in Chicago before being shipped to Oakland in 2008, then shoveled off to Colorado the following year.

When the Rockies sold his contract to the Hanshin Tigers in Osaka, Japan, in 2009, it appeared his moment was over. But Murton, with a growing family in tow — Micah was born in Colorado, Macie in Japan, Andrew in Georgia and Daniel in Tennessee — said he felt God wanted him to go, so he became a Japanese sensation.

Murton batted .349 in his debut season in Japan, racking up 214 hits, which broke the record held by Ichiro Suzuki. Over six years, Murton embraced his surroundings, learned some Japanese and pummeled baseballs, all while adoring fans flocked to him, cheering on the red-headed, 6-foot-1, 218-pound foreigner and bringing ice cream to his children.

“In Japan, I remember the first regular-season game, within the first inning, the stands were going nuts,” Murton said. “I’m looking around, and going, ‘This is the first inning, there’s no way they can keep this up,’ and sure enough.

“It kind of reminds me of international soccer almost — the band is playing, the flags are waving, it was an amazing thing to see.”

The outfielder won the 2014 batting title and led Hanshin to the championship series, but management was “dragging their feet” about picking up his option. Murton had made Japan his home, and contemplated signing with another Japanese squad. There was still good money to be made. But he thought about the dream that had been slipping further and further away with each year spent on the other side of the globe. After his 2015 season, he again packed up his life and his supporting family, with the next destination Chicago for a reunion.

The Cubs wanted to see what Murton had left, giving him an invite to spring training at the start of what would be a historic World Series season. Murton, then 34, would watch it from afar. His comeback attempt was immediately cut short after undergoing an appendectomy in camp, and when he surfaced in the minors, the Cubs had no need for an outfielder who had a .314/.349/.398 slash line as the second-oldest position player in the Pacific Coast League.

“I just knew in my heart of hearts that I could compete at that level,” Murton said of the majors, where he played in 346 games from 2005 to 2009.

The Cubs released him in November. Fourteen years after Murton was drafted, the Tigers (MLB’s version) offered him a shot last month as a long shot, seeing if they can extract the talent Murton is certain is still intact. He’s been happy with how he’s been playing, but knows his chances of cracking the big leagues aren’t to his liking. But he can’t stop. His children ask him when it’ll end, and he has to dig into analogies to explain why it hasn’t.

“Whenever you enter a race, you want to run the race and win the prize at the finish. As an athlete and competitor, there’s that drive within me to not stop until the time has stopped,” Murton said. “…If for nothing more, I owe it to [my family], to myself, to see the whole thing out. When the day comes, when it’s time for it to finally be over, I think there’ll be to some degree a sigh of relief, but it’ll be bittersweet.”

Murton is an injury away from the choice being made for him. But he’s not a demotion away from hanging up his cleats, and wonders why he can’t be the outlier who returns to the majors after an eight-year hiatus. He speaks in a tone that marries weariness and confidence — he knows he can do it, but has seen why he can’t.

“Today I grabbed the bucket of balls, and as I’m bringing it in, some of the younger players looked at me and said, ‘Hey, we’ll get that bucket,'” Murton said. “And I looked at them and said, ‘You don’t take this away from me. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do this,’ and they just started laughing.”