BOULDER — The wonks in the lab hand you the keys to a time machine and a free ride to Ann Arbor, three years hence, no questions asked. Given a chance, 2019 Steven Montez, what wisdoms do you whisper into the ears of 2016 Steven Montez?

A pause.

“How much time do I have?” Montez, the CU Buffs’ senior quarterback, says with a grin, eyes gleaming.

Much as you want. Just know that it flies.

“It’s like I just showed up not even a month ago,” Montez sighs. “I feel like I haven’t even been in Boulder that long.”

So what would you tell yourself? There’s a great future in plastics? Never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city? Always take that left turn at Albuquerque?

Another pause.

“The importance of dieting,” Montez replies.

Dieting?

“I think you can’t really sum up everything I’ve learned in football over these last three years just in a conversation. I feel like you would actually have to be inside my head to understand.

“Because I feel like I would definitely tell myself, ‘Don’t forget to look off the safety when you’re throwing verticals.’ There would just be a lot of little tips about mistakes that I’ve made and just learned from. But for the most part, it would probably just be, ‘Be tough. Work hard.’”

Eat right.

The eyes gleam again.

“You listen to country?” Montez asks.

A little.

“You know Brad Paisley?”

Sure.

“That question kind of reminded me of one of his songs. I mean, I don’t even listen to a whole lot of country. My dad listens to country. Brad Paisley’s got a song, I don’t exactly know what the song’s called. Basically, the premise of the song is if he could write a letter to himself. And that’s what that kind of reminds me of.”

The song is “Letter To Me,” released in 2007, in which a grown man tells his 17-year-old self the stuff that only time and perspective can teach. And where Montez and his CU Buffs legacy are concerned, one lyric is especially apt:

Oh, you’ve got so much going for you going right

But I know at 17, it’s hard to see past Friday night

“It’s kind of a situation of, ‘What have you done for me lately,’ you know?” notes Montez, who enters his final season in Boulder among the top five in program history in career passing yards (fourth, at 6,841), career total offense (third, at 7,648), and career touchdown passes (third, at 46). “I think, obviously, fans remember the past and all that. But fans are going to remember what you’ve done most recently.” MONTEZ BY THE NUMBERS Passing Season Games Comp. % Yards TD INT 2016 9 59.3 1,078 8 5 2017 12 60.5 2,975 18 9 2018 12 64.7 2,849 19 9 Totals 33 62.1 6,902 46 23 Rushing Season Games Att. Yards Avg. TD 2016 9 52 231 4.4 1 2017 12 132 338 2.6 3 2018 12 94 238 2.5 4 Totals 33 278 807 2.9 8

How will we remember him? The redshirt freshman in 2016 who lit up Oregon and kept the good times rolling to a South division title? The guy in 2017 who was benched at Washington State? The cat in 2018 who accounted for three picks at Cal, two that were returned for Bears touchdowns within the first two minutes?

“I kind of just think of this season as kind of my last word,” Montez says. “For the seniors on the team, our last word. (The) 2016 (season) was a great year for us and we’ve kind of had two years where we didn’t play like we had wanted to and we were expected to.”

So what does that last word look like?

What’s the closing argument?

Is it Sefo Liufau?

Or Cody Hawkins?

How important is that footprint to No. 12?

“It’s huge. Huge,” former CU teammate and Broncos rookie Juwann Winfree notes. “He’s a fifth-year senior and I’ve seen that in him, too.

“He’s way more serious. He understands what’s at stake. It’s his fourth year starting. He knows what the team needs right now. He’s been on the team when we went 10-4 and he’s been on the team when we went 5-7. So he knows exactly what we need on both sides. So he has experience, and I’m ready to see him take that next step, that mentality, just everything about his game.”

But where he’s worked — really worked — is on trust. The pocket. The play. Teammates. Himself.

“It’s almost like you’ve got to retrain your mind, even if you’re seeing colors flash in front of you, not to get out of the pocket,” says Montez, who finds himself on the preseason watch list for the Davey O’Brien and Maxwell awards after throwing for 2,849 yards and 19 scores last fall. “To kind of stay in there and just kind of work around bodies, instead of aborting the mission, you know?”

He’s stronger. Wiser. Or as wise as one can be after an offseason that featured a third different position coach in four years.

“You know, he didn’t choose it, and he’s had transitions before,” new CU offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Jay Johnson says. “But he’s very open, he’s been very coachable, he’s been eager to learn.

“When you’re at the end of things, sometimes, that’s not as easy as you think to do that — particularly when you’ve gone through (several coaching changes). I mean, at the end of the day, football’s football. But we all have our different languages and different terminologies. And so that’s what I’ve been very pleased with, is his willingness to kind of go back to ground zero and kind of learn an entirely new system.”

When you’re at the end of things, patience, like time, starts to wear thin. After long days at the office — especially days resembling the one in Berkeley last November — Montez has a tendency to beat himself up, and to do it with the venom of about 400 Twitter trolls.

“Sometimes I’ll just be by myself and just think for hours, especially after games,” Montez says. “Just kind of think about what happened and what could’ve been done differently. Especially, being a quarterback, you’re kind of trained to think.”

True. But what you’re not trained to do is psycho-analyze.

“I don’t even think there is any feeling bad for anybody in this profession,” the CU quarterback shrugs. “Because I mean, back when — a year ago, two years ago — back when I was benched at halftime of the Washington State game, I have a hard time believing that any of those guys felt bad for me. This game’s a business. It’s not about feeling bad; it’s about production. (That’s) really what it’s about. So I mean, just like this year, if I come out and throw five picks the first two games of the season, is anybody going to feel bad for me that I’m going to be benched and not going to play my senior year?

“No. Absolutely not. I wouldn’t even feel bad for myself. Because if you want to play and you want to do things that you obviously want to do in this league and in this sport and in this profession, you have to produce at some level.”

If Montez has a season like 2018, he’ll likely leave CU as the program’s all-time leader in nearly every major passing category. But if CU has another season like 2018, it’s going to feel incomplete. Hollow.

“Looking back on (last fall) now, it was a great experience,” Montez says. “Obviously, it didn’t feel like a great experience, because who wants to lose seven straight and who wants to miss a bowl game and who wants to get bashed for an entire year about the season?

“But just looking back on it, I feel like we are going to learn so much about who we are and how to get ourselves out of holes and not get into situations (like that).”

It’s not just a legacy. It’s a mulligan, the kind too rare and too beautiful not to embrace.

“And I know he will, so I’m excited,” Winfree says. “I’m really excited to watch him, and I know he’s starting to hear a little NFL talk, people project him a little bit, and I feel that’s only going to motivate him.”

Over the winter, No. 12 kept an eye on 2019 and an ear to the ground for what the pro scouts were murmuring. Longtime NFL quarterbacking guru Larry Kennan, a CU staffer under the late Eddie Crowder from 1969-71, was the position coach for Montez’s father, Alfred, when the latter was a quarterback with the Oakland Raiders in 1996. Papa Montez even sent Kennan some footage of Steven a few months back to get his old mentor’s opinion.

Kennan’s take?

Stay in school, kid.

“I said, ‘Is Steven coming out?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, what do you think?,’” recalls Kennan, whose list of quarterbacking pupils includes the likes of Drew Brees, Eli Manning and Tony Romo.

“And I just offered the opinion that, it looked to me, because I knew they had a couple of good receivers coming back, I said he needed another year. I talked to a couple of NFL scouts who said he was kind of a low-rounder at that point. But the guy’s got tremendous talent. With a really good senior year, he can go really high in the draft.”

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“This is his last rodeo, and there are so many things that go into it when you’re at that position,” Johnson says. “(He’s) very receptive, a great kid, and I think he’s really trying to dot those I’s, cross those T’s, so to speak, to put himself in a good position.”

One last rodeo.

One last word.

“Absolutely,” Montez says. “I’ve put in the work and the study and (done) footwork and gone over coverages and just left it hard in the weight room. Hopefully, eventually, that hard work will pay off. This is kind of the last year, at least in college, to try and get that done. And right a few wrongs.”

Such as 5-7. And 5-7.

“This is the end of the road for college, the last of our 4- or 5-year journey,” he says. “I think that’s how a lot of us are going to be remembered.”

For richer or poorer. Now. Always.