Marcus Lattimore embraces head coach Steve Spurrier during a Dec. 2012 news conference. This past week, not quite four years after an injury altered the course of his future, he graduated from South Carolina. (Mary Ann Chastain/Associated Press)

Finally, last Friday, Marcus Lattimore walked across a graduation stage at the University of South Carolina to have validated what so many who watch college football, or college basketball, call a free college education that standout athletes get in the form of an athletic scholarship.

Lattimore nodded to the crowd that cheered hearing his name like it did when he was scoring touchdowns at Williams-Brice Stadium. He sauntered across the runway to a pair of university officials whom he embraced. He then walked off, his white stole embroidered in red with Student Athlete and draped over his black robe that dangled just below his knees.

His knees.

“For my first injury, when I tore my ACL and my MCL, it was only one surgery,” Lattimore reminded me on the eve of his graduation, during a phone conversation. “Compared to what happened the second time, that was like a sprained ankle.”

I called Lattimore after seeing he was scheduled to testify Tuesday in Washington at the annual meeting of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, long chaired by Brit Kirwan, now chancellor emeritus of the University of Maryland System. The commission, which only carries the weight of its commissioners like Kirwan and other honchos in college administration and athletics, was born three decades ago to, as its mission statement reads, “recommend reforms that emphasized academic values in an arena where commercialization of college sports often overshadowed the underlying goals of higher education.”

Marcus Lattimore grabs his right knee after getting hit by Tennessee's Eric Gordon during an Oct. 27, 2012 game. The injury was so bad that Lattimore couldn’t fully regain his form as a running back. (Richard Shiro/Associated Press)

It asked Lattimore to talk on a panel about college athletes’ health and safety. I thought it should have asked him to comment on its other panel about college athletes and amateurism.

“I was just talking about that to another player I played with in college,” Lattimore said with a chuckle. “We were talking about guys who scored 30 touchdowns . . . and get nothing from that.”

Lattimore scored 41 TDs in, basically, two and half seasons at South Carolina. He’d have scored a lot more. But there were his knees.

The down payment Lattimore put on his free college education came Oct. 15, 2011, during his sophomore year. In the fourth quarter of the Gamecocks’ game-winning touchdown drive, a Mississippi State defender rolled onto the side of Lattimore’s left leg as he blocked. He left the game for the sidelines, where his left knee was wrapped in ice. He departed the stadium in a brace and on crutches. He wound up in a cast and couldn’t play until the next season. Still, he was so good in half a season that he was selected second-team all-SEC.

Midway into his comeback junior season, Lattimore made a huge installment on his free ride, as so many call it. He was ripping through Tennessee. He’d just run 28 yards for his 41st career touchdown when, right before the half, he was twisted to the turf after a 2-yard run. A linebacker wrapped him up and a defensive back struck his knees, whipping his body around and slamming his right leg to the ground.

Williams-Brice fell silent. It was grotesque theater. Even Tennessee players came to Lattimore’s side.

At the hospital, it was discovered that his right knee was dislocated and every ligament in it was shredded.

In 2013, Marcus Lattimore was drafted by the 49ers. He said it took 14 months for him to run normally again, but eventually he decided to go back to school and finish his degree in public health. (Mary Ann Chastain/Associated Press)

“It actually hit my nerve as well,” Lattimore told me.

That was Oct. 27, 2012.

“So they were scheduled to do four surgeries,” Lattimore said, “but they actually got it done in six hours in one surgery. And the standard ACL takes about 45 minutes.”

That was among the lessons he learned in college.

“With that injury, at the time, personally, I don’t like to reminisce about what happened. It’s in the past. But at that time, I was probably a first rounder, and I can tell you that before that happened, I felt, as far as conditioning and strength, the best that I’d felt in my whole career. And after that happened, I knew it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad it was. It cost me a lot of money.”

Lattimore was considered the best amateur running back in the country and expected to be the first running back taken in the NFL draft when he declared for it.

“When that injury happened, it was October 27th,” Lattimore recalled. “Then I had the surgery November 5th.”

For eight weeks, his repaired leg was rigged to remain completely straight. Not only was his multimillion-dollar football career in jeopardy, not to mention his ambulatory health for the rest of his life, but so too was his no-cost education at peril. But we only think about the time an injured college athlete disappears from our consciousness on the field of play, not the time they wind up missing from the reason most everyone else is in college – to get educated.

“I missed all of November, two weeks of December,” Lattimore said of his class time then, “and I left [school] as a junior. So I missed about two months, and then I went ahead and left.”

Almost as a courtesy, the San Francisco 49ers selected Lattimore in the April 2013 draft. They took him in the fourth round. He fell to the 131st player selected and ninth running back, just behind a fullback from Harvard.

“I’m forever grateful to them [49ers] for giving me another opportunity to play,” Lattimore said. “I got out there and got stronger, got faster, but the pain just never went away. When I cut, when I jumped, when I ran, even when my adrenaline was going, the pain was still there. So I had to retire because of that. And I would say to get back running normal, it took about a year and two months, so about 14 months.”

He’d taken out an insurance policy through the lords of college athletics, the NCAA, to safeguard potential earnings should such a devastating injury occur. Lattimore said it was for $1.85 million. He said he realized about 10 percent of it.

He hobbled away from playing football for good on Nov. 5, 2014.

“Then I came back [to South Carolina as a student] in January of ’15, and I had two semesters left,” he said.

“I didn’t want to [go back to school],” Lattimore admitted. “I definitely didn’t want to because I was in total football mode. That was my job, that was my life.”

It was the price he paid in exchange for that free education that scholarship athletes get. Lucky them.

Kevin B. Blackistone, ESPN panelist and visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, writes sports commentary for the Post.