BIRMINGHAM, Ala. -- Bill Clark leans back in his chair and reflects on yet another milestone in his quest to bring back UAB football.

Two-and-a-half years after the program was shuttered by the university and two years after a contingent of alumni and businessmen fought to have it restored, its head coach sits in a brand-new office inside a brand-new 46,000 square-foot, $22 million facility. Just outside his balcony is a brand-new covered practice field. It's 7 o'clock on a recent Friday morning, the sun is rising and football is almost here. Twenty-nine practices until kickoff against Alabama A&M on Sept. 2.

"It's a big deal," Clark says on the eve of preseason camp. "It really is."

The 49-year-old coach is grinning from ear to ear as he speaks. But he does that a lot these days. You get the sense he has to pinch himself every now and then to remember this is all real, that they really did hold it all together for so long and are about to come out on the other side not just ready to play a game for the first time since 2014, but to compete and win.

Players have started reporting to campus, Clark says, and everyone is accounted for.

Well, almost everyone. There are a few names on the way, but one who will never arrive, one he can't forget.

It's in that instant when the conversation turns. Clark's face darkens. He would gladly give back this new office and all of his new toys just to change one decision he and so many others have come to regret.

Because for all the joy and optimism that exists today, the reality is that UAB football isn't coming back this season in one piece. It's missing the very player who once made its return not just feel real, but exciting. It's missing his infectious smile and his incessant dancing. It's missing his enthusiasm to work even when the nearest game was more than a year away.

Greg Bryant needed a second chance just as much as UAB did. But almost as soon as he felt his life starting to turn around, it was over, as he was shot and killed while in South Florida for Mother's Day.

In the beginning, before anyone knew what the return of UAB football would look like, Clark huddled in an old, musty single-story office with his staff. The countdown to kickoff clock was shut down near the vacated receptionist desk. Some of the halogen lights overhead flickered as they attempted to construct a roster that had lost more than half its players.

Where to begin?

Clark had big plans, but no road map. He needed an infusion of talent, but he also knew his players couldn't be too young and compete. A team full of recent high school graduates would get manhandled, he thought. So it was off to the world of junior college football.

After starting at Notre Dame, Greg Bryant was the crown jewel of UAB's first recruiting class after its program was shut down. Rich Barnes/USA TODAY Sports

The names he heard his staff pitch felt vaguely familiar. Some he'd recruited prior to the shutdown at UAB, some he'd known since his days coaching high school, and some he'd seen only on TV.

Greg Bryant was the latter.

A coach called another coach who called another coach and suddenly Bryant's name was on Clark's desk. It took awhile for Clark to place him, but he got the picture soon enough: South Florida product who was a top-25 recruit coming out of high school. A rare mix of power and speed. ESPN's No. 2 tailback in the 2013 class, who played as a freshman at Notre Dame and rushed for 258 yards and three touchdowns as a sophomore. Grades, Clark soon found out, ultimately did Bryant in, landing him at a junior college near his home in Miami.

This kid, Clark thought, was in another league. He watched his film and said, "Wow, he's unbelievable!" He'd heard Florida State, Auburn and several other Power 5 schools were heavily interested in him.

Then, out of the blue, Clark's phone rang. It was Bryant, who told him, "Coach, I'm interested in y'all."

"It was a long shot, a long shot" Clark said. "If it was a Birmingham guy, you get it. But for a guy from Miami to get the whole process of who we are, where we're headed, what we're going to do ..."

He stopped himself, and added: "Guys will tell you they're coming and then, is it real?"

No one knew. The advantage UAB had over other schools was time. With no games that year, players were able to enroll, spend the year rehabbing and training and not lose any eligibility. In the case of Bryant, he could work on his grades.

"It was the perfect scenario," Clark said.

Still, they waited.

Clark had a coaches getaway at a hunting lodge in Mississippi that January before the semester began. There were a lot of new faces on staff, and he wanted to get everyone on the same page. With a fire roaring in the background, they answered the big questions facing the program: "Who are we? Where are we headed?"

And on the side, they made calls. Lots and lots of calls.

It was there, drawing the blueprint for the future of UAB football, that the final call came in. Bryant's paperwork was completed.

"It was a big deal," Clark said. "He was the bell cow of that class."

If there is truly a silver lining to every gray cloud, UAB's was this: In the midst of all the headlines about the program being shut down, it became a household name. When football was reinstated, Clark rarely had to explain the situation, whether he was talking to a recruit in South Florida or Southern California.

Then Bryant's commitment happened and it created momentum.

All the time, Clark said he'd have people ask, "Y'all got Greg Bryant?" Even coaches on his staff couldn't believe it, saying, "He's coming here?"

"It validated us," Clark said. "I'm not a star guy, but UAB has never had a four-star and this is a five-star. My son knew him better than I did. These kids had watched him in the Under Armour Game. They knew."

Safety Chris Morgan, who hosted Bryant on his official visit, was the first to know that his commitment was coming and watched as the floodgates opened afterward.

"To have a big-name player, it made other guys say, 'OK, they're building something special,'" Morgan said. "Him coming here did a lot for that class."

As Bill Clark prepares for the renaissance of UAB football, he does it without one of its most important pieces, Greg Bryant, who was shot and killed in May of 2016. Shanna Lockwood/USA TODAY Sports

Marc Jonassaint, a safety from South Florida, made no bones about it: He doesn't come to UAB if Bryant isn't on board. He wouldn't even have known who they were, he said.

"When UAB offered me, I looked at the class and went, 'Wow, you got Greg? You got all these other recruits? Sign me up. I need it.'" Jonassaint said.

More than any new facility or fancy billboard, the signing of Bryant -- and his prospective teammates -- showed the world that UAB football was real.

A boy wanted to see his mom, and no one could tell him no. Not his dad. Not his coach. No one.

They tried to convince him that going home was a bad idea. Dad talked to Coach and they agreed: He has worked so hard to get his GPA up to a 2.75 and things were going great in Birmingham, so why risk it by returning to Miami?

But it was Mother's Day and Bryant had some time off between semesters. And even though he'd made a deal with Morgan that he'd stay on campus, relax and get ready for workouts, he found a flight home anyway.

Morgan shook his head when he saw a Snapchat Bryant posted of him kissing his mother a few days later. That was the GB he knew, always trying to make people happy.

Hours later, Bryant was shot. His body was found by police in a car on Interstate 95. At the hospital, he was declared brain-dead and later passed away.

He was 21 years old.

"That was an awful day," Clark said, searching for and understandably failing to find the right words.

Bryant wasn't at UAB long -- a little more than a semester, in fact -- but even a year after his death, his presence lingers. His jacket continues to hang on the same chair where he left it at Morgan's apartment. His jeans are still at Jonassaint's place, too. Neither can bear to get rid of them.

"I've never met someone as happy as him," Jonassaint said. "He's smiling all the time, goofy. I can't see him doing anything wrong."

Players reflexively talk about Bryant in the present tense, laughing about how funny he could be and then turning serious when describing what a talent he was. When veteran linebacker Shaq Jones first went head-to-head with him in the Oklahoma drill, he wanted to give the star from Notre Dame a good lick. Only he whiffed completely and Bryant scored a touchdown.

"He said, 'Yeah, that's going to be all year long!'" Jones said, smiling. "It was just the competition that we had with him. He made everyone raise their level."

With a fresh start and a more mature approach to the classroom, teammates saw a player destined for stardom. Jonassaint believed Bryant was going to be a one-and-done, heading straight for the NFL after one season.

Together, Jonassaint said they'd talk about how they would be "the new UAB."

"He wanted to break all the records, he wanted to be the best to ever come out of here," Morgan said. "We talked about it all the time: Put UAB on the map. Be the ones who bring UAB to places it had never been before."

But now, Morgan, Jonassaint and the rest of the team have to move forward without him. They have to put UAB on the map without him.

After Bryant's death, Morgan got a tattoo on his right forearm that has angel wings surrounding big block letters that spell out, "GB4E."

"Every time I come up here, I never take it for granted," Morgan said. "Even the days I'm tired, you don't feel like getting up and going to class or getting up and going to workouts and you stop feeling, I just think about Greg. I got this tattoo. It's a reminder how quickly it can be taken away."