Neon beer signs, sports team logos and sexy posters may be de rigueur in the dorm rooms of college males, but while at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Udonis Haslem went one better. Somehow the Gators basketball player managed to keep a pit bull hidden in his room — which at the time was more emblematic of where he’d been than of where he was going: Mr. Haslem is now a captain of the Miami Heat and has won three N.B.A. championships with the team.

When they met 14 years ago, Faith Rein was more focused on the dog and its illegal residence in the dorm than in the starting center of the Gators. When her attention shifted to its owner, Ms. Rein, who, like Mr. Haslem, was attending college on an athletic scholarship, remembers thinking, “He was cute and super chill, but I was dating a football player and he was seeing a girl on the volleyball team.”

They were playing in different leagues, all right. She was raised in a Virginia suburb by a black Baptist mother and a Jewish father and had been a 100-meter national champion at age 10.

“I was an inner city Miami kid,” said Mr. Haslem, now 33, “with a drug-addicted mother, a stepmother who never married my father, and a son from a high school fling. I fought on the streets, watched friends die from drugs and violence, and learned to shoot hoops in Liberty City. I had no idea if she even liked me.”