Pablo Torre

And so as Sherman Smith goes a different way, eventually making it all the way up to the coaching staff of Pete Carroll's Seattle Seahawks, his old team,

Dillon McCullough understands, he does, why his new mentor had to go.

And while the two of them will stay in touch from afar, Dillon finds himself again back on his own, fighting to push ahead by himself, one yard at a time.

And that is ultimately how it happened, by the way.

By his senior year of college, skipping ahead now to 2005,

Dylan McCullough would, in fact, break that Miami record, the school's all-time rushing record, after leading the team in rushing for four straight seasons.

His whole bet had paid off, but it also imprinted permanent expectations of a different kind.

Yeah, and you look at the statistics.

I mean, hard to do better than that.

And so where does he get drafted?

Yeah, it's just hard, Sarah, to escape this notion that there's a gravitational pull on Dillon.

He tries to leave Youngstown, Ohio, makes it out because Sherman Smith ends up convincing him that Miami of Ohio is the place where Youngstown, Ohio kids can use it as a springboard to go to the NFL, but then the NFL chews him up, spits him out, and he tries to then fight what seems like destiny at this point because where does he wind up after trying to be an educator outside of the football field?

Wait, hold on.

So as D-Lind is like, there's a little swim fan in this, admittedly, a little swim fanning of the National Football League.

But this coaching internship with the NFL, with the Seahawks, then serves to get him where as his next stop in college?

All of which is to say that there is now real pride in Dillon's gravitational field.

At this point, Dillon has already interned for Pete Carroll with the Seahawks, where his old mentor, Sherman Smith, was on staff and eager to reunite with him before Sherman himself retired from coaching, permanently imprinting Dillon's speeches, by the way, with Sherman's lessons about responsibility.

And now Dillon found himself responsible for the running backs at Pete Carroll's old employer, the University of Southern California, at age 44.

not to mention his own biological kids.

And Deland, you should know, had zero idea that this box even existed.