As a kid, he had nightmares of Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger, of a shadow always lurking around his bed. Mom made him quit horror movies entirely.

Now, he's an adult and should be terrified of Thomas. Only he's not. Bradberry punches into the Panthers' facility at 7 a.m. each day, punches out at 6 p.m. and, back home, decompresses in an Epsom salt bath 45 minutes each night to the tune of Tevin Campbell, Mary J. Blige or Jodeci. Tonight, he will be snoring before the Florida State-Ole Miss thriller even begins.

He's shown video clips of Thomas on a Kindle Fire—each one more horrifying than the last—and doesn't flinch.

Thomas punks a Chiefs cornerback on a back-shoulder throw.

"I'll play his shoulders. As his shoulders turn, then you turn that way."

Thomas toasts the Lions' No. 1 corner, Darius Slay, for a 45-yard touchdown on 4th-and-1 with Slay caught peeking in the backfield.

"You cannot let him get behind you."

Thomas shreds the Packers across the middle of the field, then snares a one-hander against Oakland in traffic.

"He's not scared to get hit."

In the snow, against the Patriots, Thomas plucks a deep ball above Logan Ryan's head. "You just have to make a play." Against Pittsburgh, he stiff-arms a defensive back to the turf and trots into the end zone. "You've got to react to that hand and knock it down."

Bradberry calls himself a "precision" tackler who gets the ball-carrier down by any means and points to the eclectic mix of brawlers (Kelvin Benjamin, Devin Funchess) and speedsters (Ted Ginn Jr., Philly Brown) here in Carolina as having prepared him for anything. He saw Thomas tweet a photo of his Super Bowl ring at Norman after Norman boasted about shutting the receiver down.

"He's going to be a little angry and try to take it out on the first person he sees, who'll be me," Bradberry says.

But, no, he isn't up all night watching film. He's like you. He's glued to Narcos on Netflix. He's been sleeping like a baby.

Then, he's told 27.4 million people watched last season's opener between New England and Pittsburgh.

For the first time, his eyes widen.

"It didn't weigh on me until you said that right there," he says. "I didn't think about it. If things do go sour, I can always have my mom. She'll still love me. Hopefully, it'll go well. I'm going to come out on top.

"Hopefully."

Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1 p.m. ET

Bank of America Stadium

On the eve of a trip west to Denver, nobody here is concerned about Bradberry.

"He's a great player," cornerback Bene Benwikere says. "He'll be focused and be in the right spot. I think he'll be better than most people expect him to."

Says Brown: "He's going to eat. He's one of the best rookies I've seen play corner in a while. He's a mature dude. I don't know if he knows everything, but on the field, it shows. He's playing fast. He's playing confident."

Benjamin: "There's not a size he's not comfortable with. It'll be a battle. As a young guy, his attention span will have to be very short. He'll have to move on to the next play."

Head coach Ron Rivera: "He has an air of confidence. ... He doesn't care who he's playing against. He's going to go out and compete."

Jimmy Brevard / USA Today Sports

Earlier this week, one veteran took it a step further.

"If you look at him in his uniform, he kind of looks like Josh, without the long hair and a little darker skin," Ginn said. "His press game is amazing. To be a rook like that, he really has a good press game to him. I just think that if he stays patient and he plays to play—lets the game come to him—he's going to be a big player in this league."

Thursday, Sept. 8, 6:30 p.m. MT

Sports Authority Field at Mile High

Bradberry slept fine, again, but game day moves too fast for him. Way too fast.

"Time's not stopping," he tells himself. "I need it to pause for a second.'"

Mom texts "I Love You" in the a.m. and "I'm proud of you, no matter what" in the p.m. His sister checks in. Next thing he knows—bam!—he's in uniform. In that No. 24. No, Thomas never beats him deep. The smooth Bradberry is not overwhelmed in coverage.

Jack Dempsey / AP Photo

But, yes, there are plays to be forgotten. Three in particular.

• As Anderson barrels down on him, one-on-one, Bradberry maintains outside containment but is twisted up when the 224-pounder uses a filthy out-and-back-in juke move. Bradberry catches air as Anderson rumbles ahead for 28 yards, and the Broncos score a touchdown three snaps later.

• On Anderson's 25-yard score, Bradberry can't escape Thomas' vice-like grip. He's bullied at the goal line, legal or not, and Denver closes the gap to 17-14.

• On the Broncos' next drive, safety Tre Boston tips a pass that Bradberry could pick off at the three-yard line but is unable to get because he can't redirect his momentum backward in time. Denver goes ahead 21-17 soon after.

He also is flagged twice. He says he could've picked off Trevor Siemian in the first quarter too.

Carolina loses.

Bradberry watches Graham Gano's last-second field-goal attempt sail wide left on the video board and then snakes his way through the mob of players on the field to find Thomas. They dap up, Thomas tells him to keep doing his thing and Bradberry is left wondering what might've been.

"I f--ked up."

Before boarding the team bus, around 10:30 p.m., Bradberry hangs out with his agent, Christopher Coy, in the family section outside the stadium. Headphones around his neck, Gatorade in hand, Bradberry has problems breathing. It feels like he smoked an entire pack of cigarettes. Oh, he once played up in the mountains of Appalachian State's Kidd Brewer Stadium at 3,280 feet above sea level. But Mile High was a different beast.

Benwikere nods in his direction a few feet away. They shake their heads.

"I was coughing out there!" Bradberry says. "That altitude, man. I was coughing and coughing. My chest hurts."

Bradberry doesn't say much else. He can't view this game in a positive light yet. Coy looks up the box score on his cellphone and recites Thomas' pedestrian stat line.

"You didn't get scorched!" he says. "You could've got scorched. That would've been real bad."

"Sir!" a young child, maybe six years old, shouts behind us. "Sir, excuse me!"

The kid doesn't know who Bradberry is yet. Nobody does with the 24 off his back. Bradberry turns, signs some autographs, turns back and pulls out his cellphone when asked how many messages he received.

He won't check them all yet. But on his lock screen, Bradberry thumbs through the endless string of texts, Facebook messages and tweets.

Coy knows the one opinion that matters most.

"Your mother called me," he tells him. "She said you played a really good game."

That brings the first smile to Bradberry's face. He boards the team bus, boards the team plane and sleeps on the three-hour flight back. When he lands in Charlotte around 5 a.m., he doesn't agonize. Doesn't pop in film. He heads to his apartment, falls asleep again and doesn't wake up until noon.

Friday, Sept. 9, 2:15 p.m. ET

Bradberry's Apartment

Everything hit Bradberry so hard, so fast the night before.

Everything at his apartment is so quiet, so peaceful the next day. A candle is lit. The shades are closed. When he finally wakes up, Bradberry flips on his massive 60-inch TV to watch Black Hawk Down.

If you thought an NFL rookie spent the day after a game glued to film, in an ice bath or pounding weights to heavy metal, you'd be dead wrong. Bradberry couldn't stop time in Denver, so he stops time here at his place, about 10 minutes from downtown.

"A lot of chilling," he says. "A lot of relaxing, recovery."

He bought Guitar Hero Live for PS4 before flying to Denver, so he'll work in a jam session. The new Air Jordans he bought on Nike.com just arrived, so he'll break those in. He'll do some yoga. He'll crack his back on the foam roller.

Jason E. Miczek / Special to Bleacher Report

Above all, Bradberry resets his mind. He takes a more measured look at his performance.

That inflated padding suffocating his head hurt worst after his first tackle of Anderson, when Anderson steamrolled him at the end of a 13-yard run.

"Especially coming from the FCS," he says, "you don't face bowling-ball running backs like that."

His ankle's OK. Only sore from Anderson's juke later.

On his two flags, Bradberry still isn't sure what he did wrong. Step by step, he re-enacts his coverage inside his living room—"I'm supposed to knock him off his route," he says, shaking his head. As for Thomas' mauling block? That was the one element of Thomas' game he wasn't prepared for. Bradberry needs to shed his man, plain and simple.

All would be forgotten if he had picked off Siemian near the goal line. Such a play must become second nature. Ex-Panther Charles Tillman told the defensive backs this summer that he'd knock the ball out of everyone's hands during practice—players, coaches, equipment managers—so creating turnovers became a mindset.

Says Bradberry, "I'm trying to build that mentality of always finishing plays and always going 1,000 percent."

Overall, he's upbeat to an umpteenth degree.

"I didn't have anything to lose," he says. "I'm a rookie. I'm going against Demaryius Thomas; he's a great player. It's already set in stone, the stuff he's done in the league. I was going to give it all I had."

But if his mission was to escape Norman's shadow—as he said himself Day 1—he hasn't accomplished that yet. When Bradberry finally sifted through the messages on his cellphone, he saw dozens of encouraging notes from friends and family. On Twitter, he saw something else.

And then one tweet is read aloud to him:

He may be calm. He may recycle "turn negatives into positives" in Belichickian "On to Cincinnati" repetition. For a fleeting moment, Bradberry is again that kid at Arkansas State being told he's not good enough.

"Man, I don't know what to tell you," he says. "If you look at our stats overall as a defense, we played pretty well. We had more offensive yards than they did, and Thomas didn't beat me deep. I didn't give up any touchdowns to Thomas.

"At the end of the day, he didn't beat me deep."

He'll be in the spotlight again. And again. He'll be criticized again. And again. That's the nature of the cornerback position. The spotlight never tilts away.

So it's nice and dark here at his place. Bradberry prefers to live in total seclusion.