EAST LANSING – Punting for a Mark Dantonio team is not for the faint of heart. You could be out in the rain or the wind or the snow, booting from your own end zone against the hands rushing at you, where the trajectory of a ball you can barely see could mean everything in a one-score game.

Sometimes you boot it just like you’ve practiced hundreds of times before. And sometimes you drop the ball.

Jake Hartbarger did that for arguably the best team Dantonio has ever had. It was 2015 against Purdue when Hartbarger, then a quiet freshman, received the snap as he always had and simply felt it slip through his hands. His team survived, but his coach benched him the next game out. And it was fair to wonder whether that might be it for a while.

He wondered the same three years later, when an Arizona State defender plowed into his plant leg and ended his fifth season in just the second game. But the NCAA granted him a medical redshirt this spring, a sixth chance to get it right.

Hartbarger is delivering so far this year, with a 46.5-yard average for a top-20 ranked Michigan State team that is 2-0. And with Arizona State on the schedule again this week at Spartan Stadium, he’s in a spot to reflect on the windy journey he’s taken to the secret weapon role on a Dantonio team.

“We always say the punt is the most important play in football,” Michigan State defensive coordinator Mike Tressel said.

He borrows the phrase from his uncle Jim, the former great Ohio State coach who created “Tressel Ball,” or the ability to reach the pinnacle of the sport without a dominant offense. With top-five defenses that could turn any mistake into points, Jim Tressel treated field position like a game of chess and was determined to come out a winner.

It worked to the tune of 106 wins in 10 years, six Big Ten championships, a national championship in 2002 and two other national title game appearances. Dantonio was Tressel's defensive coordinator for the 2002 championship, and Mike Tressel was a graduate assistant. They started to fall in love with the punt, too.

The goal was to exert pressure rather than feel it. In the middle of the 2002 season, the Buckeyes found themselves in a one-score game on the road at Penn State when they had to punt from their own end zone. When Jim Tressel sent Andy Groom out to do the deed, he told him, "Show me why I gave you a scholarship." When he had to do it again a few minutes later, the coach had a new challenge: "Show me why the punt is the most important play in football."

Groom ripped a 55-yarder, Dantonio's defense held on and the whole team was chanting his name in the locker room after the win.

“That is a punter’s dream to have somebody that actually believes that and you can go out and actually feel a part of the team," Groom said.

Groom combined with 2003 Ray Guy Award winner B.J. Sander to boot the Buckeyes to a 25-2 record, including 11-1 in one-score games. They helped turn dominant Dantonio defenses into ones that could win a national title and two Fiesta Bowls.

“It’s the single biggest swing in field position that you have during the game,” Sander said of the punt. “The more you practice it, the more control you have over that situation.”

Around the time that Dantonio was coming into his own as a defensive coordinator, Hartbarger was starting to find his own grip on the game. He lived up the road in Watertown, Ohio, just southwest of Toledo, and his basement was decked out in Buckeyes gear.

Michigan State was the one school in the conference that offered him a scholarship. He had chances to punt for Oklahoma or Iowa State in the much higher-scoring Big 12, but he had a different goal in mind.

“Watching Big Ten football all my life, it’s definitely been a dream,” Hartbarger said.

The dream has sent him through struggles, simple and tragic, from dropping a ball to fracturing a fibula to losing one of his friends. Hartbarger was originally supposed to be in that car crash that killed former Michigan State punter Mike Sadler, along with Nebraska’s Sam Foltz before a kicking camp in Wisconsin in 2016, but Hartbarger decided to drive himself instead.

So he’s back trying to make the most of a sixth year he never expected to see. He’s the punter for one of the most talented Michigan State defenses yet, one led by Joe Bachie and Kenny Willekes that set a record in the opener by holding an opponent to -73 rushing yards. They understand and appreciate their punter, because that’s what playing for Dantonio and a Tressel disciple has taught them to do.

“We used to have him go up in front of the punt meetings as a freshman and sophomore and he was scared. He was scared,” Mike Tressel said of Hartbarger. “Now, he can run the punt meeting.”

Confidence can arrive when pressure slides, like in an extra year to play the game of football. So when the butterflies tried to come in during the opener as he was punting from his own end zone in a low-scoring battle with Tulsa, he merely caught the ball, stepped up and blasted it 61 yards away.

“There’s a certain time in your life that you’re going to get to do this and then it’s gone,” said Groom, the punter for the Ohio State team that never lost. “I wanted to make every play memorable.”

This is Hartbarger’s time to discover how much his leg can mean.

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Contact Nate Atkins at natkins@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @NateAtkins_.