He went out as a stranger into the city.

On mornings before night games, he went out walking, when the street was pretty much empty. He was always in disguise, stopping short, he joked, of wearing a prosthetic nose. He put on a sock cap or ball cap and sunglasses above his neck beard. He might drape himself in a coat or a hoodie. He wore headphones and rolled Italian compression socks to his kneecaps, wore black flat-bottom CrossFit shoes and soccer shorts. The walks were a chance to clear his head, and the morning of a night game was the best time to go. He had all day to consider what awaited him, and sitting at a hotel and thinking about the game, about the expectations of him, might make anyone else insane.

He wouldn't tell anybody where he was going. In Cincinnati, he walked across the bridge just to say he had set foot in Kentucky. In Buffalo, he walked circles around the hotel parking lot. In St. Louis, he wandered along the river, far past the stadium, into the middle of nowhere along the water.

One person who ran into him a few years ago, walking down an empty street, remembers he cut a menacing figure. "I see this huge guy in a big trench coat and this major beard, wearing a hat and sunglasses, and I'm going, 'Oh Lord, protect me,' " said Clyde Christensen, then the quarterbacks coach for the Colts. "I was scared to death. But the closer I got, I said ... 'Oh, for goodness' sake, that's just Andrew Luck.' "

ANDREW LUCK IS not in disguise as he lowers himself into the passenger seat of my two-door Honda Civic, 24 hours after signing the most lucrative contract in NFL history: a six-year, $140 million deal with $87 million guaranteed. He's leaving the University of Indianapolis rec center after taking snaps from an imaginary center, thwacking the ball into his palm and dropping back while a camera crew filmed a commercial for the sports drink BodyArmor, a company in which he owns a stake.

"Hondas are good cars," he says, shutting the door. He and his sister shared an Accord at Stanford. (In talking to his teammates, not one but two of them will ask me the rhetorical, "If Andrew were a car, which car would he be?" They both answer: Subaru hatchback. Him, personified.)

I joke about catching Luck in the afterglow of one of the biggest days of his life. Must've been a hell of a day. What'd he buy to celebrate? "Ehhh," he says. It was not a hell of a day. It was an otherwise ordinary day. He spent much of it at an event for a children's museum addition he helped design. Then he went home and read.

Turns out the only thing he's bought since the contract signing is a black bean wrap from City Cafe. When he admits this, he laughs, in a way that some of his teammates describe as goofy, even nerdy: Ehh-hyuk-hyuk. When I ask him, seriously, about walking in disguise -- if that's really what he does, if it's, as his teammates affirm, a way for him to disappear, to get out of his head, he levels his gaze. "You're going to f--- it all up," he says with a grin. He cuts me off and repeats: "Oh, you're going to f--- it all up."

The long walks and the fact that he's not really celebrating the contract are clues about what Luck expects of himself and about how he copes with others' expectations of him. His landmark contract follows the worst year in his career, a season in which he not only was injured but seemed to regress as a quarterback. He threw 12 picks in seven games, and some of those were simply awful, the kind of reckless throws scouts thought he had outgrown. It wasn't unreasonable for GMs to wonder whether others -- Russell Wilson and Cam Newton, foremost -- had surpassed him. Some of the same execs will also say that Luck's new deal is a bargain for a future Hall of Fame quarterback -- assuming, of course, that he becomes one.

And that has always been the assumption. Since his junior year at Stanford, when he could have been the top pick in the NFL draft if he'd left, Luck has contended with the impossible expectations exclusive to only a few athletes per generation: that he'll be not just a great player but a transcendent one, that his ridiculous beard will one day be cast in bronze. Now his new contract leaves no margin for error.

Luck asks me to take him back to his condo so he can shower before dinner. I pull out into the street and promise I'll try not to kill him, that I've never had anyone worth so much in the Civic. He slaps me on the back and, knowing that I live in Indy, tells me not to use my phone for navigation. He gives me a pep talk, as if I were his receiver: "You can't use GPS. You know how to get there." When we pull up to the gate in the parking garage of his condo, he gives me a security code to enter. It doesn't work. He gives me another combination, then another. Five times, and he can't figure it out. Here's Andrew Luck, Stanford-educated quarterback and now the richest in the NFL, locked out. "Wait here," he says, and gets out and hops around the gate.

LUCK SAYS HE really wants to win a Super Bowl. He expects to win a Super Bowl, and he talks about it -- a lot. He has said those two words over and over this summer, in signing off phone calls with teammates, as a point of emphasis before closing his flip phone. "I feel it this year," he'd say. "I feel like we have a good thing going, now all we have to do is go and win a Super Bowl. Let's just win a Super Bowl."

He has come close. In January 2015, the Colts made it to the AFC championship game, where Luck stepped temporarily out of the shadow of Peyton Manning, a man he'd been drafted to replace. It turned out to be a very famous game (something about air in footballs). Indy was destroyed by the Patriots, and Luck looked like an amateur against the aging-but-indestructible Tom Brady. Then, after the loss, Luck mistakenly answered "deflated" when asked how he was feeling and wished immediately that he could take it back. He had built his playing reputation as someone who didn't complain, didn't make excuses, and it sounded like a Freudian slip that he was both complaining and making an excuse. Which drove him nuts.

When he fails, Luck suffers more than most. To witness him walking the sideline after he turns the ball over is to see someone muttering expletives and hitting the sides of his helmet repeatedly -- Why did I do that? Why did I do that? -- as if to bash it into his mind forever. Colts offensive lineman Anthony Castonzo says he and Luck have argued after bad games about who sucks more. "He'll be like, 'I threw those picks because I suck.' We're yelling at each other trying to take the blame."

Then there is the matter of his seeming reluctance to slide -- something he has, almost begrudgingly, vowed to be better at this season. He refuses to comment on this with me. But Christensen, his former coach, offers this startling anecdote: "We were playing Jacksonville; he played poorly the first quarter. He breaks a run and, instead of sliding, he runs dead into two linebackers. They pummel him. I ask him, 'What were you thinking?' He said, 'I'm playing so bad, I don't deserve to slide; I'm not a good enough QB; I deserve to get the crap knocked out of me.' I said, 'You were thinking all that on your run?' He says, 'Clyde, I stink, I'm sorry.' Always apologizing, always telling other position players, 'I'm going to play better.' "

HE IS AN ELOQUENT guy, but often those words reveal nothing about him. Luck doesn't like to put himself out there, a habit he says he developed as his family followed the career of his father, former NFL quarterback Oliver Luck, who was president and GM of a Major League Soccer team and a commentator for the NFL in England and Germany. "I like to blend in," he says. "I've always been private, even as a kid. We moved around a lot. Like 13 times by the time I was 11. It was my personality, I think. I didn't want to stick out ... as the new kid."

It's not that he doesn't want to be around people. But at this point in his career he knows the expectations that fame carries, and he'd rather not. If he wants to be anywhere with a crowd, it's with his friends as buffers, playing darts on a weeknight, or at trivia night, where his team is usually called Nic Cage Fan Club (never a "k" in Nic). He stays in his condo a lot or goes to farm-to-table restaurants where the chefs and staff know him and he is left alone. Or sometimes his mom and dad, when they're in town, bring him food.

He started the Andrew Luck Book Club online this spring because he loves reading and wants kids and other people who like football to love it too. Though he doesn't have a personal Twitter account, teammates surmise that the book club's account (@ALBookClub) is so amateurish that Luck has to be running it himself. It's true, he tells me; it's actually him, and you can look there for breadcrumbs of his personality. He uploads videos of himself leaving messages for readers, sitting in his condo or by Indy's famous Soldiers and Sailors monument, or hosting Q&A's. A common theme of the books is dealing with being alone: Gary Paulsen's Hatchet, Andy Weir's The Martian, Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee. But when I ask whether the selections say anything about him, he responds, "It was unintended. I try not to make a point."

Although his former backup, Matt Hasselbeck, says Luck is "proud that he can tell you the periodic table," Luck seems almost embarrassed by his intellect. Those who really know him say he has a complete aversion to pop culture, but they also describe him as sweetly smooth. There's a story one of his teammates tells about the time at Stanford when Luck took his girlfriend, Nicole Pechanec, to a dance and gave her a corsage, and they pretended to be at prom because, having been home-schooled, she'd never been to one. He famously still uses a flip phone, and his perfect day might be making himself oatmeal, going to throw, then burying himself in a book such as Garth Stein's The Art of Racing in the Rain.

He can be passive-aggressive off the field; if he wants ice cream, or to grab a beer, or to go see a movie, he won't actually say what he wants. He'll frame it as a question: "Is anyone else feeling ice cream?" Or instead of asking someone to get up when his girlfriend enters the room, it's "Where's Nicole going to sit?" He does nothing, it seems, without calculation. The harder he gets hit on the field, for instance, the more energy he projects, bouncing into the air with those nasal, corny compliments that have become iconic, and confusing, to defenses: "Good hit, big guy!" He wants the defenders to get tired, and pissed, and it works.

Luck, an architectural design grad, can converse on just about anything, but he also communicates in another way, a primal way, with force. As we head out of the parking garage on our way to dinner, he is hitting my shoulder, slapping me on the back to make a point. His hands are huge, and he has the strength, as Hasselbeck says, of Wolverine. ("He's physical. ... If somebody was uncomfortable with that, they would be very uncomfortable with him," Castonzo says.) When he talks, he uses his hands, thrusting his digits into the air for emphasis. He's describing a building, a piece of midrise brutalism in downtown Indy, but I'm looking the wrong way. He grabs my shoulders, strongly enough to lift me off the ground a little, and turns me in the other direction. "No, no, there," he says.

Ehh-hyuk-hyuk.