The Bears’ Mark MacDonald has reconnected to two of his mother’s sisters and his four cousins during his four years at Brown.

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BROWN UNIVERSITY / Tom Maguire

PROVIDENCE — In the players biography section of the Brown basketball media guide is the question: “What person in history would I like most to meet?”

For four years, Mark MacDonald always said his mother.

The woman whose picture is on the table next to his bed.

The woman he has heard countless stories about.

The woman he never knew.

“I always knew it was a different way to grow up,” he says.

But that was the way it was, the way it always had been. He was about 11 or 12 when he first knew the specifics. It was a Christmas night, and he asked his father what had happened, and his father told him that his mother suffered an aneurysm shortly after he’d been born, had never left the hospital.

What his father didn’t tell him was that he had promised his wife on her deathbed that he would be both father and mother for their newborn son. What his father didn’t tell him was that he had put up balloons outside the house to welcome home his wife, Susan, and their first child.

Until it all so irreparably changed.

So the journey began for a father and a son.

“I was on a mission,” says Richard MacDonald. “I was going to do everything in my power to take care of him.”

For it was just the two of them. Yes, there were grandparents, and, yes, there were aunts and uncles and cousins. But when everyone went home, it was just Mark, his father, and a picture of his mother on the table next to his bed.

“I never really felt anything of substance that connected me to her,” he says. “I always felt I was extra special to my mother’s three sisters, because they said I looked like her, but in a sense that only made the pain worse. Mother’s Day was the worst.”

Sports were his life raft. His father coached him in Little League, youth basketball, Babe Ruth League, and sports only made him closer to his father. When he was just a little kid, his father put up a 6-foot hoop in the basement. He played endlessly, and maybe it was this simple: he could lose himself in the game.

Many summer nights, he would drive his car to the outdoor courts in Lexington, Mass., and turn on his headlights so he could shoot in the dark.

His high school career was out a storybook. His team won four league titles, and in one of the finals he had 39. He was the player of the year in his league twice, and a two-time All-Scholastic in The Boston Globe, the outstanding male athlete of the year in his high school. He was recruited by Holy Cross, Penn, and Vermont, and one of the reasons he decided on Brown was that it was close enough to his father, and that some of his mother’s family lived in the area.

It was all a storybook then, the culmination of all those little fantasies that ran around in his head when he used to shoot by himself in the dark. He was 6-foot-9, he could shoot, and basketball ran through him like a beam of light.

Then he came to Brown and it all got complicated.

“When we started to lose, I didn’t know what to do,” he says. “I wasn’t ready for it.”

Playing basketball at Brown is never easy. It’s not high school, with its cheers and walking through town in your letter jacket. It’s time and commitment, often to the sound of one hand clapping.

It’s playing too many games on the road, and too many long bus rides when you question what it’s all about.

By the time he was a junior, he had had it. Or so he thought. His best friend had left the team. The coach who recruited him was gone. He always seemed to be hurt, a succession of nagging injuries. So he went to new coach Craig Robinson and said he’d had enough. Robinson said the door was open if he changed his mind.

Three weeks later, he did.

“I wasn’t happy without it,” he says. “And I wanted my family to be able to see me play.”

He has come to see basketball as a metaphor for life: that you can work hard and not have your dreams come true.

That’s what we don’t want to accept, not really. We want to think that if we work hard, all our dreams come true. MacDonald knows differently. His last two years at Brown, after all the weightlifting and all the hard work, he always was bothered with leg problems. Then in the first home Ivy game of the season he got a concussion and missed the next eight games.

But just when he thought he was through for the year, he came back on the final weekend on the road against Harvard and Dartmouth.

And in the Dartmouth game, the last game of his career, a game Brown had to win to finish with 19 wins, the most in school history, he came off the bench and scored nine points to win the game.

And when it was over, he and his father embraced on the court.

“We both just lost it,” says Richard MacDonald.

As if they both knew they were embracing over more than a basketball game, but for a journey that began in September 1985, when a child was born and a father’s life changed forever.

In many ways, his father knows that his mission is over, the promise he made to his wife on her deathbed.

Their son will graduate from Brown in two weeks.

He has come so very far from the little kid shooting in his basement on a 6-foot hoop, back when sports was something he could lose himself in, something that could make him forget, for a little while anyway, that his life was different from everyone else he knew.

And Mark MacDonald has come to believe that he was somehow meant to come to Brown, where he has reconnected to two of mother’s sisters and his four cousins, and has come to feel closer to his mother because of it.

His mother, whose picture is on the table besides his bed.

His mother, whom he never knew.

His mother, whom he always carries in his heart, whether it’s Mother’s Day or not.

breynold@projo.com