As Central Florida opened its football season in 2015, it had won the American Conference championship the year before and finished in the national top 10 in the AP poll the year before that.

The season opener, with Florida International, came down to a last- second field goal attempt by UCF kicker Matthew Wright.

Wright, out of Lampeter-Strasburg High School, was a redshirt freshman. It was his first career college field goal attempt.

The kick was blocked, fell to Earth 20 yards short. UCF lost 15-14, and went 0-12. George O’Leary stepped down as athletic director six weeks in and as head coach two weeks later.

This scene from a train wreck was Wright’s choice as the most memorable kick of his career.

“It was like hitting rock bottom right away, and it helped me,’’ Wright said last week by telephone from Orlando.

He made eight in a row after that.

“There’s going to be a next kick,’’ he said. “That’s the lesson. It helped me grow up as a person and as a kicker.’’

You probably have a rough idea what happened next. After the ‘15 season, UCF hired Scott Frost, a well-regarded Oregon assistant.

The Knights went 6-7 the next year. They haven’t lost since.

Wright got in on the ground floor of something big.

“Under Coach O’Leary, everything was old school,’’ Wright said. “Run up the middle, a fullback, the whole nine yards. The team wasn’t on board with everything.

“That first year under Coach Frost, the feeling around the (football) building changed. You could see everyone buying into a process.’’

UCF was becoming the little guy kicking sand in the bully’s face. Giant-killers, despite the school’s 66,183 undergraduates, the most on one campus in America.

Last season, UCF went 13-0, was denied a berth in the college football playoff based mostly on lack of schedule strength, and dispatched Auburn, which had beaten Alabama in its previous outing, in the Peach Bowl.

That got Frost the Nebraska job. It got Wright and his teammates rings, a parade through Disney World and downtown Orlando (not the same thing), a trip to the Pro Bowl and an unofficial but heartfelt claim to the national championship.

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The same argument will be made again, this year, if the 13-0 Knights beat LSU in the next week’s Fiesta Bowl.

“We just worry about what’s next,’’ he said. “That’s LSU. Obviously, everyone on our team thinks we can compete with anybody.’’

Wright isn’t a smack-talker. There is no boulder on his shoulder.

“That’s one of reason I was drawn toward kicking,’’ he said. “I’m pretty even keel. Don’t show a lot of emotion, which is good for a kicker.’’

Wright was a multi-sport athlete coming up through the L-S ranks. He played varsity football, soccer and baseball in high school, and didn’t get serious about kicking until the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, when he realized the starting placekicker job could be his in the fall.

Then he started doing the camp-and-clinic, individual-coach circuit that is part of the kicking subculture.

As a senior, Wright was a three-star recruit according to ESPN, around the 25th-ranked high school kicker in the country. That’s not high enough for scholarship offers to roll in.

But a kicking coach recommended him to UCF, which had three outgoing senior kickers on its 2013 team. The Knights offered Wright in January of 2014, and that was about the end of his recruiting.

He has delivered, on the field and in the classroom. He is UCF’s career leader in points, field goals, PATs and field goal percentage. This year, he was 71-for-71 PATs and 11-for-13 field goals.

He also graduated Dec. 14 with a degree in aerospace engineering, a 3.8 grade-point average, and a goal to become an astronaut.

Yes. An astronaut.

“I’ve always been interested in space,’’ he said. “That’s why I chose this major, and being an astronaut is something that’s kind of propelled me.’’

Wright said he already has a couple job offers; he declined to name the firms, but they’re private companies, not NASA. He acknowledged, though, that the companies are aware, and support, his lofty ambitions.

Which are to explore space and to kick in the NFL.

“It’s a tough situation in a way,’’ he said. “I’ve been in school for a long time, but I’ve been playing football for a long time, too.’’