His retreat, his escape from the guilt and pressure and “shame” of it all – his word – arrived halfway across the world. Andrew Luck spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Netherlands, carving a turkey he bought from the local butcher, poring through books, trying to learn Dutch. It was there he finally started to see it, this reality he'd long resisted. Hope withering, pain persistent, he realized he might never play football again. Worse yet, he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

He was 28 years old.

It sent him into a dark place, a place where hope was hard to see. He’d been lying to himself for months, believing he’d wake up one morning and – poof! – the pain would vanish. It never happened. The pain stayed. The nightmare dragged on. He grew impatient. Angry. He kept throwing, and some days after he was finished, he could barely move his arm. “I was a sad, miserable human,” he remembers. “I was not nice to myself, nor was I nice to anyone else. I was a miserable SOB to be around. I was nervous. I was scared.”

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Torn cartilage in two ribs, a partially torn abdomen, a lacerated kidney that left him peeing blood, a bum ankle, an injured thumb, a concussion – name the body part and the Indianapolis Colts’ franchise quarterback has played through it. But this was different. This was a wrecked throwing shoulder, bludgeoned by years of abuse, the discomfort for so long crammed to the back of his mind, often numbed by pain-killing injections. The NFL winnows life into a weekly war, and those wars must be won. A “binary” existence, Luck calls it. Sundays were all that mattered.

Now the price was more than he could bear.

He played hurt for two years, and somewhere in between the ribs and the kidney and the shoulder, Andrew Luck lost his football innocence. The game used to be so much fun. Now it was so much agony. Would it ever be fun again? Would he ever throw without pain again?

What if he just walked away?

“There was an uncertainty, an apprehension,” he says. “I was scared, scared in my core, in my insides. There was a time I was very scared about football, and about my place in football.”

For so long, there was something refreshing about Andrew Luck, the privileged son of an NFL quarterback who never acted like he was a bigger deal than the backup left guard. He coolly replaced the most iconic athlete in the city’s history, then made no mention of it. He won 36 games his first three years with a shoddy offensive line and no run game, then praised his teammates. He celebrated a $140 million contract extension by attending a fundraiser at a children’s museum, and privately fumed, according to someone close to him, when an erroneous report indicated he wanted out of Indianapolis a year later. He rides his bike to the Indy 500. He’s been dating his college girlfriend for 10 years. He’d be the last NFL player to join Instagram.

“A lot of guys love being in the NFL, not a lot of guys just love football,” his former backup, Matt Hasselbeck, once said. “Andrew Luck just loves football. There’s a difference.”

But fat contract or not, Luck wouldn’t be doing this if he didn’t love it, and he didn’t love football in 2017. He hated it. Hated himself at times, too. “If I wasn’t having fun playing football, I’d quit, I’d retire,” he says flatly. “I wouldn’t do it ... if I didn’t love team sports, I’d do track and field.”

It started on one of those Sundays where a game had to be won. The Colts were a quarter from 0-3 early in the 2015 season, on the road in Tennessee, until Luck lifted them to a stunning 14-point comeback in the fourth. His heroics came at a tremendous cost. His shoulder was beaten to a pulp that day. The pain wouldn’t go away for almost three years.

He decided against surgery after that season but had no choice a year later. Luck spent half of 2016 in the training room, crawling his way to Sundays, somehow carrying the Colts to eight wins. All the while the shoulder grew worse. Loathe to talk about himself, all Luck will concede on the matter is that the year was “taxing.”

Colts owner Jim Irsay offers a clearer view: “He really went through hell.”

But 10 months after the surgery, the shoulder still wasn’t working, the losses were piling up and time was running out. A cortisone shot did no good, so the Colts shut him down. Luck blamed himself, then questioned himself. Tired of being the story, he hopped on a plane bound for Europe, unsure whether that shoulder would ever let him play football again.

The joy that seemed stamped across his face his first few years in the league, the joy that first sprouted when an eight-year-old popped a scratchy tape into the VCR of his dad playing quarterback for the Houston Oilers, was fading. Andrew Luck’s love for football blossomed on the playground at the American School in London, where he drew post patterns on his palm for his Swedish, Italian and Korean classmates. He never imagined the game could be taken from him before he turned 30.

But slowly, the pain had robbed him of that joy, stolen something from him he wasn’t ready to lose. This wasn’t one of the physical hurdles Luck so routinely cleared early in his NFL career. The brainy kid out of Stanford could take the punishment with the best of ‘em, rise to his feet, toss a compliment to the defensive end who’d just turned his body into a piñata, and fire a touchdown the next play. “He’s got grit,” said his head coach of six years, Chuck Pagano. “He’s not soft like everybody else.”

But this wasn’t about grit or toughness or how much pain Luck could swallow. For months, this was about patience, and Andrew Luck didn’t have it. He kept thinking he’d wake up one morning and his throwing shoulder would feel like it did back at Stanford, then he’d slip on his Superman cape and save the Colts the way he always had.

When it didn’t, Luck started lying to himself, convinced he could throw anyway. His impatience begat stubbornness. “I convinced myself I could force things to happen, and I paid for it,” he says.

After the Colts shut him down from throwing in late October, he didn’t pick up a football for months. He retreated to the Netherlands, removed himself from the game and reset his expectations. All fall, he’d been waiting for what he calls “the silver bullet.” When he realized it would never come, he turned the corner.

“I had to learn that,” he says now. “I got so frustrated. And when I accepted that – accept is the wrong word. When I allowed that to happen, when I became a little more patient with myself, and a little more honest with myself, that improvement is all that matters, I did cross a line. There was sort of an inflection point.

“That desire, to continue to want to play, sort of forced me to (say), ‘F it, I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna see what happens.’”

But no one saw this inflection point, no one saw Luck turn the corner. While he rehabbed halfway across the world, rumors swirled back home – that he had a beef with Irsay, that he wanted out of Indianapolis, that he’d never play football again. Teams actually called the Colts’ general manager, Chris Ballard, asking what it’d take to trade for Luck. Ballard laughed them off. “We’re not trading Andrew Luck,” he said months later, still chuckling at the idea. “I’m not putting that on my résumé.”

Privately, Ballard always believed. He walled off outside speculation and saw a shift, gradual as it was, in Luck’s demeanor as the months passed and his confidence climbed. “Do I have any doubt that he’s going to be ready?” Ballard said in February, back when uncertainties still clouded Luck’s future and a fanbase remained bitter over the empty guarantees Irsay had made the previous season. “No. I don’t.”

It was a gutsy statement at the time, considering the furor Ballard would’ve faced if Luck hit another setback. A month later he doubled down, trading out of the third position in an NFL Draft dripping with quarterback talent. He knew what others didn’t: Luck was on his way back.

Over those few months, the two grew close, the battered quarterback fighting through the darkest days of his career, the general manager who on Day 1 vowed it was always going to be about more than The Quarterback. Then the Colts went 4-12, and it was obvious this team wasn’t going anywhere until The Quarterback got right. Ballard recommended Luck read “The Inner Game of Tennis,” a classic in the sport psychology field that has for decades helped athletes reimagine the mental approach to the game. Luck, newly acclimated to the audiobook world, listened to it every morning on his drive to training camp.

Ever since, he's been like a kid on Christmas morning, if Christmas morning lasted six weeks, took place on muggy football fields in Westfield and involved hits from Terrell Suggs. Luck was beaming when the Colts reported for training camp back in July. He’d waded through the darkness and fallen back in love with football. The pain was, finally, gone.

No more lying to himself. No more searching for the silver bullet. No more guilt.

Instead, simply, football. Just football.

His first day off, Luck was back at the team hotel early, asking his new head coach, Frank Reich, to join him in the film room. Coach and quarterback reviewed every throw he’d made to date. Reich loved it. During a preseason game, Luck joked with his closest friend on the team, left tackle Anthony Castonzo, that he was “sort of happy” that he’d been slammed to the turf earlier that night by Suggs, the Ravens’ veteran linebacker. Luck had landed hard on his right elbow, same as he did three years ago in Tennessee – the play that began the nightmare.

“I didn’t feel anything,” Luck said. “Didn’t give it a second thought. That’s a big deal.”

The team he rejoins has almost entirely been turned over by Ballard; just 16 players on this roster were on the field the last time Luck played a regular season game, back on New Year’s Day 2017, and that was only 20 months ago. The division he rejoins is far more imposing than when he left it; gone are the days of the Colts rolling to six easy wins in the AFC South.

Reich's team will lean on him once more, if only because he’s all they have.

But on a midsummer morning, Luck isn’t thinking Jalen Ramsey or J.J. Watt. He’s at the University of Indianapolis, running a free clinic for kids, watching their eyes light up as his 10-yard passes land in their arms. He’s strikingly at ease, comfortable and confident in ways he wasn’t 12 months ago, when he was scared to his core about his place in the sport he fell in love with when he was eight years old.

The fear that flooded his mind back then has been replaced with hope. He is a quarterback restored.

“We don’t have any Patriots fans here, do we?” Luck asks the group of kids, smiling. When one camper bravely raises his hand, Luck jokingly tells him to leave.

A few minutes later, Luck stands at the center of the field, gazing out as the youngsters run routes and catch passes from the quarterback who nearly had the game stolen from him. In their beaming faces, Andrew Luck sees it, the joy he lost and has found once again.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.