Marcus Smart took the positive view. Not everyone would.

The contract hunt ended up prosperous for the Boston Celtics' arguable best defensive player, but only days ago, it seemed there could be far less paper in Smart's future. Smart rested unchosen nearly three weeks into the NBA's free agency period, eventually returning Thursday to the only team he's ever played for on a four-year, $52 million deal. It took 19 days for one of the league's feistiest perimeter stoppers and his incumbent squad to reach an agreement, many of which they weren't in active negotiations, though the Celtics insisted they wanted to bring Smart back.

Such was life in restricted free agency, when players tend to linger late into the summer. That's been especially true this offseason, given that most teams headed into July without significant cap room. It left few suitors for Smart, who fits in with Boston better than he would maybe anywhere else.

He could have veered toward negativity for a lonesome two-and-a-half weeks. He didn't.

"I didn't know where I was going to end up," Smart told reporters on a Friday conference call. "I was just enjoying this whole process, and I was taking it in and enjoying it. This is a fun thing, as frustrating as it is, it's fun. Not many people in the world can say they're in talks to play for an NBA team to make a dream become a reality."

Before the multiyear deal to return to Boston presented itself (and negotiations moved quickly once both sides started to find similar ground in the middle of this week), Smart had only pseudo-options. He met with the Memphis Grizzlies and Brooklyn Nets in free agency, according to Yahoo! Sports' Shams Charania, though neither organization made him a viable offer. The Nets, without a bulk of cap room, could have presented an offer that would have been less than what Smart ended up signing for with the Celtics. The Grizzlies, meanwhile, eventually inked former San Antonio Spurs forward Kyle Anderson, the only restricted free agent to change teams so far this summer.

The longer Smart sat unsigned, the more enticing picking up his qualifying offer could have become. Doing so would have netted him $6.1 million this year with the Celtics along with an opportunity to enter unrestricted free agency next July, when far more teams will have consequential cap space.

"This [was] a problem a lot of people wish they could be having...I definitely had my thoughts on taking the qualifying offer," Smart said. "But like I said, all my options were open. I never closed anything. You just have to wait and see what God had in store for me."

Relentlessly positive: that's just Smart's thing, even after a free agency that left him -- by his words -- "frustrated" at times.

"This is a business, so you can't get too high, get too low on things," he said. "Obviously, if it's not coming from direct sources. You're hearing all kinds of things from people. But for me, I enjoyed the experience."

That there was a happy ending might help just a tad with that framing, especially considering the reports that surfaced saying Smart was "hurt" by the Celtics' lack of contact with him at the beginning of free agency.

Smart famously declared not too long ago that he was worth more than $12 million to $14 million a year. If only to appease the basketball gods' senses of humor, he got exactly in the middle of that. His four-year contract technically guarantees him only $50 million, but there are likely incentives (he'll have annual body fat weigh-ins) to get him an extra $500,000 annually, per sources. And after Smart fought to a price well beyond the mid-level exception inside a market that was mostly unforgiving to the middle class, Smart, himself, has been quite forgiving.

Life lends perspective, too. Smart has spent much of his offseason in Dallas with his mother, who has cancer. He said Friday she is "stable" and "hanging in there."

"When you kind of go through adversity or something like this in your family it kind of puts things in perspective," Smart said. "Everything else becomes a blur to you and really not that important."

He is simply remaining constructive -- with the good and the bad.

"This is a hard time but at the same time, this is an exciting time for my family," Smart said. "With the signing, it kind of brings a little joy to the situation to lighten up a situation that was a little dark and gloomy."

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Fred Katz covers the Celtics for MassLive.com. Follow him on Twitter: @FredKatz.