WEST LAFAYETTE – Before the last game he will ever play at Mackey Arena, Ryan Cline does what he always does: Walks onto the court two hours before tip-off, ice cold, and starts making shots.

He begins on the baseline, 10 feet from the rim, and shoots it flat-footed three times. Makes all three. He moves back a few feet for a jumper. Makes it. Then another. Five shots into his warmup, he’s 5-for-5 and shooting corner 3s and he’s making all of them as well. Behind him on the Purdue bench, among a collection of managers and assistant coaches, there is a growing buzz.

This is what they’ve grown accustomed to seeing at Purdue, where teammates gauge Cline's temperature at practice — always warm, usually hot, occasionally scorching. And on scorching days, which is what Cline seems to be having Saturday before the Ohio State game, teammates jockey for a spot on Cline’s team in practice.

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In about five hours, after Purdue has demolished Ohio State 86-51 on Cline’s senior day, Boilermakers coach Matt Painter will tell the crowd that Cline is “one of the most unique shooters I’ve ever been around. I’m shocked when he misses.”

But it’s still pregame, and Cline has been out here for maybe five minutes, going from zero to scorching like that. Now he's running the baseline and flashing to the corner, catching passes from graduate assistant Joey Brooks and burying 3-pointers. He starts moving around the arc. Everywhere he goes, it's raining buckets.

The buzz behind Cline is growing until it bubbles over and someone on the Purdue bench cuts loose:

“Whooooo!”

Afterward, after the last game he will ever play at Mackey Arena, I tell Cline I was watching his warmup, feeling the buzz, hearing the whooooo! He looks quizzically at me. Has no idea what I’m talking about.

“I didn’t hear anything,” he says.

A few years ago, it would have been different. A few years ago, when he was feeling himself, he’d have heard it. He’d have heard it all, and he’d have relished the attention. When a youngster first gets to college, he’s a boy. Along the way, he becomes a man.

This is Ryan Cline’s story.

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Most improved scorer in Big Ten

The growth we can see is on the court.

He came to Purdue as a celebrated shooter after an Indiana All-Star career at Carmel, where he finished second in IndyStar Mr. Basketball voting to eventual Purdue classmate Biggie Swanigan. He played significant minutes his first three seasons, averaging 13.6 minutes as a freshman, 21.4 as a sophomore and 17.3 as a junior, but never scored much.

Shoot it? Oh, he could always shoot it. But Purdue had other options, like Swanigan and A.J. Hammons and Dakota Mathias and Vincent Edwards and Isaac Haas. Cline never averaged more than 5.4 ppg in any of his first three seasons, but Purdue won. Purdue won big.

Cline was protecting the ball, sporting what is now the second-best ratio of assists to turnovers in program history at 2.81 to 1.

“And just his presence,” Painter says. “He spaces the floor just by being out there. Ryan Cline has been a winner his whole life. High school, college. Teams he’s been on have always had big-time success.”

After last season, Purdue graduated that transformational senior class of Edwards, Mathias, Haas and P.J. Thompson (who ranks first in school history with a 2.94 ratio of assists to turnovers). To win big this season, Purdue was going to need more out of Ryan Cline.

“I needed to prove to myself that I can play here, and I can be an elite-level player,” Cline says. “And I feel like that’s what I’ve done.”

No arguments. Cline is averaging 11.9 points and 3.3 assists. He is shooting 41.6 percent on 3-pointers, getting to the free-throw line almost as many times (25) through 28 games as he did in his first three seasons combined (30 attempts in 103 games), and protecting the ball at that same high level: 95 assists, 38 turnovers.

He is putting the finishing touches on a career that will be remembered in the Purdue record books. In addition to his assist-to-turnover ratio, Cline is seventh in career 3-pointers (213, on pace to finish in the top three) and eighth in 3-point accuracy (40.5 percent). Soon he will shatter Troy Lewis’ single-season record of 100 3-pointers, even if Carsen Edwards got there first, passing Lewis on Saturday with his 101st 3-pointer. No matter. Cline (86) will finish second, another prominent spot in the Purdue record book.

Cline has come a long way from his 4-ppg junior season. He has come farther than anybody in the Big Ten, you might say. His 7.9-ppg jump in scoring from last season to this season is the biggest in the league.

That’s the development we can see. But that’s not what Matt Painter was talking about after the game Saturday, when he said of Cline: “More than anything, he’s grown up.”

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The road back from rock bottom

Rock bottom was June 27, 2016. It was a black Lexus, Cline’s foot on the gas pedal, engine revving, Hamilton County Sheriff’s deputy knocking on the window. No response. Cline was asleep. Passed out, you might call it. “Unresponsive,” according to the deputy’s report.

The deputy broke a window, turned off the car and rubbed Cline’s sternum until he woke up.

“Not readily responsive,” according to the report. “Extremely lethargic.”

Also: a strong odor of marijuana in the car, perhaps coming from those “green leafy substances” sprinkled throughout the car. Cline was charged with possession of marijuana and entered a pretrial diversion program. Painter suspended him for the first six games of his sophomore season.

Teammates barely saw him.

“When you’re young, you make mistakes — everybody does, whether it gets into the public or not — and his did. And it was embarrassing for him,” Thompson says. “It changed him. He was really different, I’m not going to lie. Normally he’s joking around, but he didn’t talk, didn’t go out, didn’t do anything. It was hard for us, too, because as friends we want to be there for him, but he wasn’t himself for a while.”

Looking back, Cline calls June 27, 2016 “the best thing that ever happened to me.” At the time, though, it was mortification. Cline has a large extended family, goes back to Carmel routinely to see them, and will get up early when he’s there on weekdays to walk his little nieces, Ashlyn and Kenzie, to the bus stop. Given all that, this is what he was thinking after June 27, 2016:

“I can’t be disappointing my family like this.”

Cline withdrew into himself, and for the most part he has stayed there. He comes out of his shell when it’s appropriate — he’s not a hermit; he lives with teammates Tommy Luce and Sasha Stefanovic – but the Ryan Cline who climbed into that black Lexus on June 27, 2016 is gone.

In his place is a more serious, more studious Purdue senior who will graduate in May with a 3.1 GPA in organizational leadership, a GPA he has boosted nicely from the nadir of 2016. Cline comes home after practice and spends a few hours to himself, and is in bed most nights by 11 p.m. He has cut ties with a handful of the people he used to hang with before June 27, 2016, though he makes it clear: What happened that day was nobody’s fault but his own. Still, he has taken steps to insulate himself.

“This was a classic example of something happening and waking him up,” Painter says. “Lot of times with guys, something extreme has to happen to kind of get their attention, and I think that’s what happened. He’s better on the court, better socially, better academically. More than anything he’s grown up. He’s responsible.”

Says Thompson: “It was a complete 180 for him.”

Cline’s senior day speech was emotional for him, saying goodbye to teammates and classmates and coaches, and he lost his train of thought when he remembered that his nieces were in the arena. He looked around Mackey and tried to point them out.

“Shout-out to Kenzie and Ashlyn, my nieces,” said Cline.

“Awwww!” said the crowd.

Cline had wanted to say one more thing, about himself and Purdue’s other senior, Grady Eifert. He didn’t realize he’d left it out until about 30 minutes later, the crowd gone, just Cline and me talking in an empty hallway at Mackey. I’m noting how hot he was in pregame warmups, and that he hit two shots in a row early in the game, and that after eight minutes he had five points, three rebounds and two assists.

You were on your way to a big game on senior day, I’m telling him, and then you took a backseat. Carsen Edwards took over. Matt Haarms and Aaron Wheeler got going. And it worked: Purdue won by 35. But still, I’m saying: For a while, it looked like you might have a special senior day.

“I did — we won,” he says. And then he remembers.

“I forgot!” he says. “I actually wanted to bring it up in my speech, and I completely forgot.”

Then say it here, I tell him. Cline nods.

“It’s funny how with people, it’s all about me,” he says. “‘I’m going to put up my shots, I’m going to get mine.’ At the end of the day, I wanted to let people know that all Grady and I care about is that Purdue wins. I had two points the other day and we beat Illinois, and I was the happiest guy in the locker room.”

This is how it sounds when a boy becomes a man.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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