It's a Sunday afternoon at Crisler Center and no one is sure where Caris LeVert is going.

The sophomore is running as his teammates give chase. One second he's there, the next he's gone, swallowed by the darkness of the tunnel leading to the Michigan locker room.

Back in the arena, everyone is left wondering what just happened. LeVert ended the first half by catching, turning and shooting what would be a buzzer-beating 3-pointer in an eventual win over Michigan State. It's not the shot that draws the confusion. It's LeVert's response.

Upon firing the 3, LeVert landed, wheeled around and took off running up the floor. The ball, meanwhile, still hung in mid-flight at the keystone of its arc.

As all eyes watched the ball, LeVert already was halfway to half court gazing into the stands. Michigan coach John Beilein would later say that the guard was looking up at his mother.

Did Kim LeVert know her son was staring at her?

"No, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me," she says the following the day. "The things he can do never surprise me."

Kim LeVert beams and boasts about her sons the way mothers are supposed to.

The 51-year-old has spent the last 22 years as a teacher. She tends to first graders in the Columbus City Schools system in Ohio. Once mother hen in a family of four, she’s now a mother to two boys entering manhood -- Caris LeVert and his brother, Darryl. She can talk and talk and talk about those boys.

The claim about never being surprised, though, is quickly disproved.

Kim LeVert is told something that brings pause.

“Really? Wooowwww,” she says, stopping and processing.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that. I’m glad to hear he’s talking about it and actually articulating how it’s shaped him. That’s good to know because he normally never talks about his dad.”

___

Besides his looks and his height, Caris LeVert inherited a trait that defined Darryl LeVert.

Darryl was funny, but reserved. Smart, but quiet. He combined a competitiveness that turned games of H-O-R-S-E into wars of words, while still managing to stay warm and personal.

Caris carries the same disposition. Being shy and being reticent are two different things. Caris is the latter. His 19-year-old voice is more of a low hum, like the oscillating fan in the corner of the room. When thrust in front of the media, quotes come in short, nonspecific sentences.

Caris LeVert isn’t much interested in revealing Caris LeVert.

Then came Feb. 17.

LeVert sits in the Towsley Room inside the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross Academic Center. The day before, he scored 25 points in a loss to Wisconsin, one of a number of performances that have turned him from a skinny, overlooked, under-evaluated guard from Pickerington, Ohio, into arguably the most important player on a Michigan basketball team standing alone atop the Big Ten Conference standings.

The chair doesn’t fit LeVert well. His 6-foot-6 frame debunks da Vinci's Vitruvian Man -- all arms and legs. He’s up to 185 pounds now. It’s taken a while. His old high school coach, Jerry Francis of Pickerington Central High School, is quick to point out: “That boy was barely a buck-forty in his junior year.”

Despite the chair, LeVert looks comfortable. He loosens up. For a gifted guard ranked second in scoring on the No. 16 team in America, little is known about what’s inside. LeVert was a three-star recruit out of high school. He came to Michigan with little fanfare, only landing in Ann Arbor as a late signee after John Groce left Ohio University, where LeVert was originally committed, to take the Illinois job.

LeVert’s ongoing sophomore campaign -- from scoring 24 points at Duke early in the season to averaging a team-best 16.9 points over U-M’s last nine games -- has come out of nowhere.

So after volleying back answers to a half-hour of questions, LeVert looks up, straight ahead, when a question catches his attention.

“Caris, have there been any defining moments in your life?”

He looks around an empty room, considering the question and the door it leads to.

"Well, on Easter of sophomore year of high school, me and my brother found my dad dead on our living room floor."



The door swung open.

___

It is April 4, 2010, and Caris LeVert is rustling himself from sleep. Easter service awaits at New Salem Baptist Church in Northeast Columbus, where the LeVerts lived until moving 20 minutes southeast to Pickerington when Caris was in second grade.

A screech shatters Easter morning.

“CARIS!”

Running downstairs, 15-year-old Caris doesn’t know whether to look at his shock-soaked brother or his father’s body on the floor. The elder Darryl LeVert is crumpled next to the couch in the family room. It looks like he’s sleeping.

The younger Darryl LeVert, Caris’ younger brother by 11 months, is screaming and flailing and wailing.

Darryl LeVert posses with his young son, Caris LeVert.

“What’s wrong with dad?”

There’s no pulse. Scrambling for a phone, Caris makes two phone calls. He calls 911, begs for help.

About 400 miles away, Kim LeVert is enjoying brunch at IHOP after Easter service with her mother and other relatives living in Washington D.C.

Her cell phone rings.

“Wait, what???”

Kim LeVert’s screams silence the restaurant. Urged outside by her mother, she walks into the parking lot, stopping for a moment to collect herself, and says, “OK. What did you just say?”

“Mom,” Caris answers. “Dad is dead.”

Born October 8, 1963, Darryl Wayne LeVert's heart failed him after 46 years.

Hanging up the phone, Caris LeVert and his brother run outside to a neighbor’s house, sprinting across the driveway, past the adjustable basketball hoop.

___

In the Towsley Room earlier this month, Caris LeVert is smiling in a way nostalgic sons tend to smile.

“Oh we battled,” he says. “Dad would beat me every time. I don’t think I ever beat my dad in 1-on-1. I’d cry in front of my friends, everything. That didn’t matter to him. He kept on beating me anyway. He was so competitive.”

All the basketball drove Kim LeVert a little crazy. She’d yell down to the basement for Caris to stop dribbling that damn ball. She’d crank open her bedroom window overlooking the driveway, telling everyone to calm down.

“I’d have to come out and say, ‘That’s enough of that!’” she says. “It would get out of hand.”

Dad would say, "Oh we’re just playing."

Mom would say, “Oh, well that’s a little bit too much playing.”

The father-son rivalry existed only on the court. With mirroring personalities, Caris and his father were bound by similitude.

"He was my best friend," Caris says. "He was just a cool, cool guy. He was always chill, like me."

According to Kim, Darryl LeVert taught his sons everything they know about basketball. Now Caris plays at Michigan and the younger Darryl plays at Connors State, a junior college about an hour south of Tulsa.

In the months and years since Darryl LeVert’s death, Caris used basketball as his outlet. He’d rarely, if ever, speak of his father, except with his brother. He bottled it. The younger Darryl LeVert, meanwhile, struggled.

“That was a tough time in my life,” Darryl says. “Going through that, at first, didn’t seem real. But after the funeral, after everything died down, me and Caris developed a bond that will never break. He helped me and I tried to help him. We talked to each other every day. We are really close. I think that helps us, but I would hate to think that our dad’s death is what made us closer.”

Caris LeVert, a sophomore guard, is averaging a team-best 16.9 points over Michigan's last nine games. The Wolverines are ranked No. 16 in the country at 20-7 overall and 12-3 in the Big Ten.

Kim LeVert tried to put the boys into counseling. They adamantly refused.

“Caris, for one, refused to open up about it,” she says.

He would, however, do just about everything else Kim LeVert asked. He stayed out of trouble, scored good grades and brought in the groceries when she’d return from the store.

On the basketball court, he’d spend his final two seasons at Central on Jerry Francis’ varsity team. He led the Tigers to a 26-2 record and a Division I state title as a senior and found someone to fill portions of a deep void left by his father’s absence.

Early in his junior year, Caris snapped back at Francis when the coach dogged him in practice.

“I pulled his butt out of that gym and said don’t you ever talk back to me again,” says Francis, a former Ohio State star and longtime college coach. “He needed that tough, fatherly love to some degree. He respected it and he did everything I told him to do.”

Driving along I-71 in South Columbus toward the end of Caris’ senior year, Francis and his star player bantered like normal. A building off to the side of the highway caught LeVert’s eye.

Pointing out the window, he told Francis, “Hey coach, that’s where my dad worked.”

Darryl LeVert spent his last eight years as a graphic designer at DaNite Sign Company.

“That was the first time he ever opened up and mentioned his father to me,” Francis says. “I couldn’t believe it.”

___



There's a YouTube video floating around out there dated May 27, 2008.

Darryl LeVert and his boys are in the driveway. The clip, filmed by an aunt, opens with dad -- tall and fit and smiling -- swooping toward the basket and dunking a hand-sized ball. One after another, Caris and young Darryl run and jump, trying to reach their father’s heights.

Time after time, each comes up just short.

All these years later, both can reach the rim -- and more.

Caris talks about his father with dry eyes. This is no sob story. Nearly four years after that dark Easter, he’s not left asking why. He’s too busy being thankful for who his father was and what his father gave him.

“I’m OK with it now, at peace, I guess,” Caris says. “I feel like I got everything I needed to know from him. He taught me so much. His big thing was keeping a level head -- never get too high or too low. Just be calm, be smart.

"I still think about him all the time.”

Walking across the cafeteria at Connors State two weeks ago, Darryl LeVert was stopped by a baseball player. He’d seen a thin kid that looked an awful lot like Darryl on ESPN’s SportsCenter that morning.

“It was just crazy to me that someone in this tiny town in Oklahoma saw my brother on TV,” Darryl LeVert says.

Little brother watches all of big brother’s games.

“He reminds me of my dad,” Darryl LeVert says. "He does all the same moves as my dad and his shot looks just like my dad’s.”

Caris LeVert says his willingness to speak now of his father's death doesn't stem from his success on the court. Rather, his success on the court stems from the confidence he's gained from dealing with his father's death.

Kim LeVert recently asked Caris, “What do you think your dad would think about this year you're having?”

“I don’t know,” her son answered.

Kim knows.

"My husband would be so proud," she says, "but he wouldn't be surprised. None of us are."

Brendan F. Quinn covers University of Michigan basketball. Follow him on Twitter for the latest on Wolverines hoops. He can be contacted at bquinn@mlive.com