He peered through the cold Pacific Northwest air on a late fall night in 2000.

As top-seeded Skyline trailed White River in the first round of a Class 3A Washington state high school football playoff game, 5-year-old Max Browne looked on anxiously. The clock showed 37.6 seconds.

“He was sitting in the stands, bitting his fingernails,” his father, Mike Browne, said.

Mitch, the oldest of four Browne brothers, was a senior and led the Spartans as their starting quarterback. This threatened to be his last high school game.

“They can’t lose,” Max said.

Then Mitch directed a 76-yard drive and tossed a 2-yard touchdown pass with only a couple seconds left. Skyline won, 21-19. A playoff run continued. In December, it ended with a state championship.

This too meant everything to Max.

When he arrived home from school on Fridays in those days, he took naps, so his parents would let him stay up late to watch the Spartans. He later became a ball boy for the team and began playing quarterback in the third grade.

“He was the only 5-year-old who would sit through a full game,” Mitch said.

It drew Max in.

“Max, unlike other 5-year-olds, was intense,” Mike said.

A fire sparked and stayed aglow.

He first watched his brother. He watched his high school predecessor Jake Heaps set records. He watched Matt Barkley set a template. He watched Cody Kessler lead USC amid a tumultuous three-year period with four head coaches.

He has learned by watching.

When the Trojans open their season Saturday against defending national champion Alabama, he finally takes the torch.

MAKING PLANS

Eleven years and four months after first hatching the plan to follow his brother as quarterback, Max Browne had met every expectation.

He too starred at Skyline, won a state championship and became one of the most sought-after prep prospects in the country. Scout.com pegged him as the top quarterback in his class, ahead of Jared Goff and Christian Hackenberg.

Any college football program stood within reach.

On a midweek April 2012 day, Browne picked USC over other blue bloods, Alabama and Oklahoma.

Los Angeles was closer to Sammamish, Wash., and Mitch lived in the area.

The tradition helped too. He grew up playing with the Trojans in the NCAA Football video game series. The program was amid probation, but Coach Lane Kiffin guided a 10-2 finish the previous season and it would debut atop the Associated Press poll the next fall.

A few days before his commitment, he met with Barkley for lunch at Lemonade, a popular sandwich spot at USC’s campus center, across from the bronzed Tommy Trojan statue.

He watched Barkley start at USC for the previous three seasons and sought a similar opportunity.

When Browne enrolled the next year, Barkley would be graduated. He could also start right away.

A succession plan was formed.

‘EVERYONE HAS DIFFERENT PATHS’

On Aug. 6, in the hours before the Rams played their first preseason game at the Coliseum, Goff took a photo of the home locker room and sent a Snapchat to Browne.

It drew laughs. Earlier that week, Browne snapped a photo to Goff of someone on USC’s campus wearing the rookie’s No. 16 jersey.

The two quarterbacks became friends on the recruiting circuit when they attended the same college camps and showcases.

They will both play quarterback in the same city this fall, but on different stages. While Browne begins his first season as USC’s starting quarterback as a redshirt junior, Goff has been selected as the No. 1 overall pick by the Rams and signed to a rookie deal worth almost $30 million.

Hackenberg, the Penn State quarterback who was ranked behind Browne out of high school, became the New York Jets’ second-round pick.

“It’s weird,” Browne said, “but it doesn’t work me up or anything. I think I’ve really become at peace with the idea that everyone has different paths.”

Neither of them waited one game. Goff started immediately as a freshman at dormant Cal, as did Hackenberg at sanctioned Penn State.

Increasingly, it has emerged as a trend in college football. In the Pac-12 last season, three true freshmen started their team’s opener at quarterback – Jake Browning at Washington, Seth Collins at Oregon State and Josh Rosen at UCLA.

At USC, it is more rare. Quarterbacks have waited. Barkley remains the only true freshman quarterback in school history to start a season opener.

Of the Trojans’ last five full-time starting quarterbacks, two of them did not start until they were fourth-year juniors and two others as third-year sophomores.

A three-season wait is par for the course, however difficult.

“It’s easier early on, because you’re still processing the offense, the playbook and whatnot, but by the third year you got it down,” said John David Booty, who debuted as a fourth-year junior in 2006. “Now you’re comfortable and ready to play, but you’re still having to sit. That can be difficult.”

THE OPTIONS

Browne studied the lineage of USC quarterbacks, particularly Matt Cassel.

In Cassel’s well-documented path, he never started a game for the Trojans, backing up Heisman Trophy winners Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart, before he was plucked by the Patriots in the seventh round of the draft. He is beginning his 12th NFL season.

Browne’s college career got off to a similar start. He never followed Barkley by starting as a freshman. Instead, he watched Kessler over three seasons become the most efficient passer in school history.

Had redshirt freshman Sam Darnold beaten out Browne for the starting job in training camp, Browne’s path may have continued tracing the one forged by Cassel.

Friends brought it up for consolation. It hardly worked.

“Who’s the second guy in the NFL who’s ever done that?” he asked his dad.

“That answer’s nobody,” Mike said.

For weeks, this is where Browne’s story hovered between two diverging narratives, as is so often in the case in sports.

Had Darnold won, Browne was prepared to consider transferring.

“It certainly was an option,” Mike said.

Max was eligible to transfer and play without sitting out a season, because he graduated in May. He just needed to clear three hurdles: have USC grant him a release from his scholarship, be accepted into another university and be enrolled in graduate classes.

It was a tight window, but still possible that he could have started elsewhere in 2016.

“That was most realistic,” Mike said last week. “The coaches wouldn’t have been surprised. They had to know that was something. But he didn’t read into that, because that never happened.”

It became only a hypothetical.

Browne starts Saturday and becomes a modern example of patience while transfers become increasingly common.

That is perhaps a more fitting development.

“I never wanted to be a guy who was just bouncing around and never could get his footing,” Browne said.

A WEARING WAIT

Browne typically glides around campus on a red Razor scooter.

He looks the part of the 21-year-old college kid. In his second spring semester on campus, he pledged a fraternity. He has mostly lived in the same off-campus apartment with walk-ons from the football team and others from his Lamda Chi house.

He talks fondly about his USC experience. He likes his classes. He majored in communications and is now working on his MBA. He forged close friendships. He enjoys watching sports, particularly the NBA. A self-described LeBron James fan, he was at Game 7 of the Finals between the Cavaliers and Warriors in Oakland, wearing the MVP’s No. 23 jersey.

He stayed grounded while waiting for his chance to play.

“He eased into different channels to focus his energy and time, so he’s been productive and been busy, when some people would have fallen off the train,” said Jeff Miller, a former walk-on defensive tackle with the Trojans and roommate.

His approach earned respect from teammates.

Last year, he received the Bob Chandler Award for undergraduate leadership at the team’s awards banquet.

The year before, he was named the offensive weightlifter of the year, an unusual distinction for a quarterback.

“Because it was Max Browne, people knew why,” said former USC kicker Alex Wood, another roommate.

But it became more of a slog than he first expected when he arrived in January 2013, hoping to edge out Kessler and Max Wittek.

“When you’re a senior in high school, it’s I’m going to win the job or I’m just going sit for three, then play two,” Browne said, as he started to clap between each word for emphasis. “I did not anticipate how much that would wear on me, those three years, as far as falling up short, not being pleased with the circumstances at hand, being tough on yourself.”

‘ALL-AMERICAN KID’

Before, the wait had been short.

As a high school freshman in 2009, Browne watched Heaps, the No. 1-ranked quarterback in his class, lead Skyline to a third straight state title.

But after one season, it was his turn. He was almost predestined.

Steve Sarkisian extended him a scholarship to Washington in 2010, before his first start.

When Browne threw three touchdown passes in a narrow seven-point win over rival Bellevue High in the second start, Bellevue coach Butch Goncharoff phoned Skyline’s Mat Taylor afterward.

“I thought when Jake Heaps graduated, it was going to be an even playing field,” Goncharoff quipped.

Skyline students quickly branded him Jake Heaps 2.0.

“Everything happened perfectly for him,” Taylor said. “He was kind of that All-American kid in high school.”

Browne added another state championship as a senior, finishing with back-to-back titles.

Like Barkley, he was the Gatorade National Player of the Year. Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson delivered the award to the high school.

In a pass-happy spread offense, he finished with 12,953 yards, more than any passer in the history of the state of Washington.

It was idyllic.

THE CHANCE

When Sarkisian was hired as head coach by USC in late 2013, he quickly introduced Browne to Steve Clarkson, a private quarterback coach from Pasadena who had also worked with Barkley and Leinart.

Clarkson described Browne’s footwork then as “awful.” He ran him through a variety of drills. One, for example, involved simulating a tennis match over a 20-yard radius, where Browne would shuttle across the grass while repeatedly catching a football and tossing it back.

The goal, Clarkson explained, was to synch his footwork with his throwing motion to maximize his arm strength.

Analysts had long raved about Browne’s arm, particularly the way he threw the deep ball.

He never needed to thrust his upper body to push the ball downfield.

“It was effortless,” said Brandon Huffman, a Seattle-based national director of recruiting for Scout.com. “It wasn’t like he was throwing 70 yards with regularity, but he could drop a 50-yard pass without putting it like a javelin thrower.”

His wait has offered a chance for development in such ways, not a drawback for a USC quarterback making his first start against an SEC powerhouse.

At Arkansas in 2006, Booty threw for three touchdowns in the second half of a 50-14 rout.

At Auburn in 2003, Leinart’s first pass was a touchdown to Mike Williams. USC won, 23-0.

When Coach Clay Helton announced Browne as the starter, he cited his experience.

Offensive coordinator Tee Martin, who led Tennessee to a BCS national championship in 1999 as the Volunteers’ quarterback, brought up his field vision and ability to anticipate passing routes downfield.

That is perhaps his most enticing quality, so much so that Clarkson called him “Matt Leinart with a stronger arm.”

“Matt had incredible anticipation,” explained Clarkson. “He was seldom late with the ball. He understood how to throw guys open. Max has a lot of that.”

It wouldn’t be Max Browne’s first followup act.

Contact the writer: jkaufman@scng.com