As a ballhandler and a defender attacked each other between rows of orange cones, twisting and turning at video game speed, Danny Hurley shouted above the squeaking sounds of their high-tops. On a hill in Staten Island, the basketball coach was filling the dimly lit gym with the clichéd commands of his craft.

Move your feet. ... Keep him in front of you. ... Beat him to the spot.

One Wagner College player committed the not-so-venial sin of fumbling the ball in a rebounding drill, and Hurley barked, "You're fighting for your life." He kept wincing as he dug his hands into the gray stubble of his scalp, looking and sounding like any one of a thousand overcaffeinated lifers who confuse practice with a military exercise in the heat of a cold war.

Only Hurley isn't just another 39-year-old face in that crowd. He's the son of Bob Sr., living legend at St. Anthony in Jersey City, N.J., one of three high school coaches inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Of greater consequence, Danny's the kid brother of Bobby, former lottery pick of the Sacramento Kings, two-time national champion at Duke, maybe the best pure point guard college basketball has ever seen.

Role reversal: Former college star Bobby Hurley, left, is now in little brother Danny's shadow. Jeff Skopin/ESPNNewYork

Bobby was observing these drills in relative silence, assuming the subservient role of right-hand man. Suddenly the little brother has emerged as the family star, the Eli of the Hurleys, and the big brother has taken Peyton's place in the background.

Now 22-4 at Wagner two years after rescuing Mike Deane's 5-26 team, Danny is responsible for the most improbable New York basketball story this side of Jeremy Lin. Bobby is a first-time assistant learning the Northeast Conference trade from a figure inspiring enough to lead the Seahawks to a road victory over the Pittsburgh Panthers, then the 15th-ranked owners of a 70-0 record against Wagner's league.

Danny likes to tell a story from that Christmastime trip, if only to level off a relationship flipped upside down in his favor. He was feeling a rush of adrenaline after the postgame presser, imagining his own place among the "SportsCenter" highlights, when he spotted some fans waiting near the Wagner bus.

Danny began flexing his left hand for the autograph requests to come, and then the fans pushed past him and called out a familiar name. "Bobby," Danny said. "They wanted him to sign his Sports Illustrated stuff from Duke. I thought I was some big deal, and not one of them asked for me. Not one."

Truth is, Danny gave Bobby a second career in the gym. In the years after he lost his shot at NBA stardom in a near-fatal car crash, Bobby was searching for a purpose, a fresh calling. He dabbled in scouting. He got into the horse game, and suffered the indignity of losing his failing stable to a bank.

If Bobby wasn't drowning, he was adrift at sea. "Looking for a life preserver," Bob Sr. said. Danny threw him one. He left his own prep dynasty at St. Benedict's of Newark, took the challenge of a rebuild in the underbelly of Division I, and offered Bobby a job.

Danny owed him one anyway, a huge one, because Bobby once threw him a life preserver that pulled his little brother from the depths of a depression that nearly destroyed Danny's love for the sport, if not Danny himself.

Little brother was a struggling ballplayer at Seton Hall, a point guard who could no longer stomach the comparisons to Bobby, the seventh overall pick of the 1993 draft. They had something called Hurley Day at Madison Square Garden that December, Bobby's Kings against the New York Knicks in the afternoon, Danny's Pirates against St. John's at night, and neither one had played worth a damn.

But Bobby was only a handful of games into a promising NBA career, and Danny had already completed two low-impact seasons before starting his junior year 2-for-17 from the field, including an 0-for-6 against St. John's as Bobby watched from the stands. "The Hurley Day debacle," Danny would call it. Little brother was hurting, and big brother made a mistake that night he still regrets 18 years later.

Facing Bobby, left, in a 1992 NCAA tourney game "was the last thing I needed," Danny says. AP Photo/Amy Sancetta

Bobby didn't visit Danny in the locker room, and headed out with friends instead. Hours later, when the Hurleys finally met up in a Greenwich Village restaurant, Danny was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The fans, the expectations, P.J. Carlesimo's confining system -- they were all crashing down on him. Danny wanted to quit. He needed to quit. And yet there was this one small problem:

Hurleys aren't allowed to quit.

So Danny asked his older brother for permission to walk away. "And if Bobby said to me, 'Dan, you've got to dust yourself off and get back in there,' I would have done it," Danny said. "I would've gone back to practice that next day, and it would've gotten worse. I would've continued down a dangerous path for me personally, because I was in a very dark place dealing with some very dark thoughts."

The ball was in Bobby's court. His old man was a Jersey City probation officer, a volatile coach who confronted the drug dealers harassing his players, a cop's son who sent his own sons to the roughest neighborhoods to find the roughest playground games. Bob Hurley Sr. wouldn't go on to win 26 state titles and more than 1,000 games over 40 years at St. Anthony by letting a little adversity get the best of his boys.

So over a late-night beer, only eight days away from his own life-shattering event, Bobby had to assess the damage and make a call. Wrap a warm blanket around Danny, or kick him in the ass.

The most prolific passer in NCAA history was about to deliver his most critical assist.

• • •

The Hurley boys were living a "Truman Show" existence before they could walk. Bob Sr. would put them in courtside cribs or on courtside blankets while he conducted practice, and Bobby and Danny took it from there.

They were 5 or 6 when they started entertaining high school crowds at halftime and during timeouts by swiping balls off the rack and draining jump shots from all over. Ferris High, Dickinson, the Jersey City Armory -- it didn't matter where. If Bobby, 18 months older, made a 15-footer on one end, Danny would absorb the crowd's cheer, peek down the floor, and make sure his next J came from 16 feet or beyond.

"Everything we did was in public," Danny said. "We were Bob Hurley's sons, so nothing was anonymous in our lives." They ran a 10K race as 7- and 8-year-olds, and just like that, they ended up on the Jersey Journal's front page.

Separated by 18 months, Danny, left, and Bobby Hurley have been a tag team from the beginning. Photo courtesy Leslie Hurley

Bobby was a righty, Danny a lefty, and they grew up wanting to be Mandy Johnson, David Rivers and Kenny Wilson, Bob Sr.'s big-time guards. They did hard time at White Eagle Hall, the bingo parlor that doubled as the Hurley practice gym, dribbling around nails emerging from the battered wood floor and setting up the bingo tables and chairs when Bob Sr.'s whistle said so.

Bobby was 32-0 as a St. Anthony senior, the state's player of the year, and a national champ on a team that included Jerry Walker and Terry Dehere, bound for Seton Hall. Bob Sr. had been brutal on Bobby, showing his Friars there would be no favoritism for his first-born.

Bobby was once forced to run laps for an hour and 45 minutes for failing to mentally engage in practice. "Many times Bobby just wanted to run away and not come back," Walker said. "I had to chase after him a lot. I always had to counsel Bobby and tell him, 'Your dad just wants you to be great.'"

On his way off the floor in his final high school game, on his way to a scholarship at Mike Krzyzewski's Duke, Bobby stopped the sophomore subbing for him, Danny, who had missed most of the season with a broken finger. Hurley mythology includes various accounts of their exchange, but the brothers agree that Bobby told Danny something like this:

"It's all on you now."

As it turned out, Bob Sr. didn't coach Danny quite like he'd coached Bobby. "We ran more stuff for Danny," the father said, "asked him to look for his offense more than Bobby did."

Bob Sr. also did a better job caging his temper with his younger son. "It wasn't even close," Walker said. "I'd go back to St. Anthony games, and I'd see Danny joking around in warmups. That would never, ever be allowed with Bobby."

At 6-foot-1, Danny was a little bigger than Bobby, a little better from the perimeter. He averaged 22.8 points as senior on a 32-1 team and, like Bobby, was named the state's player of the year. Scholarship offers poured in, and Danny figured he could replicate his St. Anthony experience at Seton Hall, share the ball with Walker and Dehere and play for another in-your-face coach.

Only Carlesimo's system called for its quarterback to be a game manager, not a runner and gunner, and Bobby had already claimed one national title and two Final Four appearances under the less restrictive approach applied by Coach K.