JEFFERSONVILLE – They were so young, weren’t they? Look at that picture. IU basketball coach Archie Miller is 19 or 20, a sophomore guard on the North Carolina State basketball team, smiling into a future of unlimited possibilities. Next to him is Brian Keeter. Another kid, another smile.

Another future.

It’s an autograph session at N.C. State and they’re supposed to be sitting at different tables, Brian at Table 3 and Archie at Table 4. Only, no. They are sitting together with their Sharpies and their bottles of water and their smiles and their whole lives ahead of them.

Life goes the way it goes. Archie married his college sweetheart and became the coach everyone knew he’d be, this younger of two sons of a high school coaching legend in Pennsylvania. His older brother, Sean, was an assistant on that 2000 N.C. State team, and now coaches Arizona. Archie started on his own path after graduation in 2002, heading off to Western Kentucky among five schools in seven years, heading toward the head coaching position everyone knew he’d get someday. He got it in 2011, at Dayton.

Brian also graduated in 2002, and life took him to Charlotte, N.C. He did some coaching himself, at a YMCA. Had a girlfriend in Gastonia. Worked in real estate. Sold houses.

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Archie and Brian stayed in touch for a few years. Text messages, mainly. They’re not much for phone calls, these two, Archie so serious and so driven at his job and Brian so reserved, so unassuming. By 2006 Archie was in Tempe, Ariz., an assistant for their old coach at N.C. State, Herb Sendek. Brian was a Realtor in Charlotte.

The text messages had been slowing, and by December 2008 they stopped. It happens, you know? Archie was married and 2,000 miles away and living his life, heading for that future everybody saw coming. And Brian was living his in Charlotte, heading for his own future, when he fell asleep behind the wheel of his black Honda Civic and started heading for that utility pole.

***

Brian and Archie, they’ve never spoken about it. Neither one is sentimental — Archie still so serious, Brian still so unassuming — so they don’t talk about what Archie means to Brian, or what Brian means to Archie, or why they reconnected so strongly after the accident that left one of them paralyzed from the waist down.

“I really appreciate what you’ve done for me, our friendship means this and this?” Brian is telling me, concocting sentimental words they have never spoken. “Nah. That’s just not him. That’s not me either.”

We’re sitting in a coffee shop 10 minutes north of downtown Louisville, Ky., where Keeter has lived in an efficiency apartment for the past year, the latest stop on his journey toward emancipation from that damn wheelchair. Brian Keeter will walk again, and that’s not merely what he wants. It’s what he expects. To expect less, well, that would suggest he accepts life in a wheelchair.

“Accept is not a good word for me,” Keeter says. “That’s something I’ll never, ever do.”

Keeter’s journey has taken him to Atlanta for three years of treatment at the Shepherd Center, a hospital devoted to spinal cord injuries. He has spent weeks at a time at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, a Johns Hopkins affiliate on the cutting edge of paralysis research.

He undergoes regular physical therapy, volunteers for experimental treatments, spends 2½ hours a day with an electric stimulation device from the Netherlands — “Not FDA-approved,” Keeter says with that half-grin of his — and is in Louisville because of a breakthrough at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center: an electronic spinal implant that allows a paraplegic to regain full range of motion in the legs. Keeter has a small apartment downtown, so close to the KSCIR that he gets there by wheelchair unless it’s raining. He has bills to pay, same as everyone else, so Keeter got a job — at the KSIRC.

“He’s driven now,” Archie Miller says. “He’s been trying to figure this thing out. He’s on it.”

There are ways to measure the progress of a paralysis patient, just as there are ways to measure the growth of a friendship. Here, we can do both at the same time.

***

His phone is blowing up. Calls, texts — N.C. State teammates from 1999-2002 are spreading the word, and that’s how Archie Miller hears about the accident. He doesn’t know much, only that Brian Keeter is in the hospital and it’s serious.

“At that time I started to research it, and it’s very serious,” Archie says. “Brian’s almost, literally, dead.”

Doctors kept Keeter in a medically induced coma for nearly two months. A circular scar peeks just above the neckline of his N.C. State T-shirt, the hole doctors used to pump air into his lungs. He suffered brain trauma and broken bones up and down his body, and spinal cord damage near the hips.

“Doctors thought they were going to lose me,” Keeter says. “They told my parents to be ready for that.”

The rekindling of a friendship starts with a text from Archie to Brian in early 2009, after doctors bring him out of that coma. Brian is still in the hospital, still dealing with his new reality, coming out of the coma and learning the extent of his injuries and dissolving into bitter tears. Archie is an assistant at Ohio State, still so driven. They are texting now every few weeks, mainly when Archie texts Brian — still so unassuming — and that spring they are both on the move. Brian gets out of the hospital, and Archie leaves Ohio State to work for his brother at Arizona.

In December 2010, Arizona comes to Raleigh to play N.C. State. Archie knows Brian is coming, knows what to expect, but when he is summoned from the visiting locker room at PNC Arena he is not ready. Back in the day Brian was the bigger man, 6-2 to Archie’s 5-9, but now Archie is the one looking down. And he notices Brian’s legs, how they’ve atrophied.

“You get stunned when you see something like that,” Archie says. “He’s not the same guy, and it wasn’t too long ago either. Three or four years later, he’s in a wheelchair.”

Archie gets the Dayton job in 2011. Brian moves to Atlanta for the Shepherd Center. Brian and Archie are still in touch, still texting, and Brian is driving now. He uses a hand control for the pedals, and he tells Archie he’s coming to a game at UD Arena.

“I don’t think he believed me,” Keeter says, “until I showed up.”

Brian moves back to Charlotte and goes online to get his master’s degree in health care administration. When nearby Davidson joins the Atlantic 10 in 2014, the connection deepens. Now Dayton, also in the A-10, is coming to the Charlotte area, and Brian still drives seven hours to UD Arena. Dayton visits Alabama in November 2016 and Brian is behind the bench, noticing the coach his friend has become, the coach he always knew Archie Miller would be.

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“Archie knows what’s coming,” Keeter says. “He knows what action Alabama’s about to do. Even when he was at Arizona, before he got the Dayton job, I used to jokingly tell him: ‘You’ll be the next Coach K.’ That’s how good I think he is. He’s still Archie, but older and in charge and leading these young kids. But he’s still the same guy I met on an unofficial visit to N.C. State. The way he talks, mannerisms. He hasn’t changed.”

No, but in the last few years, Brian has. His leg muscles are starting to regenerate. His legs have long had involuntary spasms, and now he is using those spasms to his benefit. Brian attaches ankle weights to both legs, and when the spasm comes, he gets resistance training. He is wearing shorts at the coffee shop that show toned muscle.

They are Dayton basketball shorts. Toward the end of Archie’s tenure there, Brian is a regular. When Dayton beats VCU 79-72 on March 1 to clinch the A-10 title at UD Arena, Brian is in the locker room with the celebrating Flyers. When Dayton plays Wichita State in the 2017 NCAA tournament at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, Brian is there.

“I’ll be honest, Brian’s almost like part of the staff,” says IU assistant Tom Ostrom, also an assistant at Dayton. “He’d come in 3-4 hours before game and he’d eat pregame with us. From our (graduate assistants) to the coaches to Archie, we consider him part of our staff, part of the family. I look at (Archie and Brian), I watch them, how they treat each other. It’s a very deep and meaningful friendship.”

And then Archie got the job at IU, about 90 miles from Brian Keeter’s efficiency apartment.

***

Different reasons, but they were both beloved at N.C. State.

Archie was the smallest guy on the court, feisty and having cartoon shooting range. Brian was the walk-on from nearby Cary, good enough to get scholarship offers from smaller Division I schools, and a garbage-time scoring machine. In barely 40 career minutes he scored 35 points, going 8-for-14 (57.1 percent) on 3-pointers.

“Keeter Time,” they called those final moments of victory at PNC Arena, and it got so loud when he scored that they nicknamed the sound meter registering the arena’s decibel level: the Keeter meter.

“He could shoot now,” Archie says. “He could always shoot.”

Dunk, too. Friends in Charlotte didn’t believe him, of course, so Keeter used a workout one day at the YMCA to prove it. Two weeks later, he hit that utility pole.

A few years later, the first time he pulled into a gas station in his hand-controlled car, Keeter punched the attendant button and watched as someone else pumped his gas.

“That was in Atlanta,” he says. “I felt so awkward, I’ve never done it again.”

He doesn’t want help — he wants to help others. To that end, Keeter started The Walk On Foundation and holds the Hope to Walk Classic golf tournament.

“I try to do what I can to fund research, help speed it along,” he says. “What little I can do, I do.”

Meanwhile, Archie took one of the greatest jobs in college basketball. Brian’s first look at the spectacle came May 31 at Huber Farms, where a crowd of almost 1,000 gathered, some paying $1,000 for a table, just to hear Archie speak. A few weeks later when Archie held his first high school team camp at IU, Brian was there. They watched the games together, then went to Nick’s for pizza and wings.

“(Brian) doesn’t put himself out there, like he needs your help a lot,” Archie says. “He gets to where he needs to go, gets in and out. He doesn’t have anybody feeling sorry for him. He’s completely and totally functional with life, but it’s kind of hard to watch at times. I remember him 19, 20 years old running and playing and lifting weights. But he’s the same person. Looks the same way, talks the same way, acts the same way.

“He’s always been a good guy to be around. Knows the game pretty well too. At Dayton he really got to know the players, the coaches. When the Indiana thing happened, he got excited again a little bit. Louisville to Bloomington is shorter than to Dayton. At the end of the day, it’s giving him someone to talk to. And I really value him.”

He’s never said those words to Brian, of course. It’s not who Archie is, still so serious. His given name is Ryan, but he’s been called Archie since he was a grumpy toddler who reminded his relatives of infamous TV grouch Archie Bunker.

That sentimental stuff, it’s not who Brian is, either.

“I’ve never told him this,” Brian says as we’re leaving the coffee shop, “but I really appreciate what he’s done for me. I appreciate his support obviously, and also keeping me connected to the game that I do really love.”

We’re in the parking lot, where Brian is taking apart his wheelchair, stowing it in the back seat of his Ford Escape. He gets behind the wheel and fiddles on his phone, and now my phone is buzzing. It’s a text from Brian. A picture. He and Archie are sitting together at Table 4, forever young.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.

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