Bobby Perry, who graduated from East Providence High School yesterday, will will attend Wheaton College, in Norton, Mass.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

EAST PROVIDENCE — Sometimes you find role models in the strangest places.

And when you least expect it.

One day last week, I came here looking for Bobby Perry, a high school basketball star who graduated yesterday from East Providence High School.

I was there because three months ago I had gotten an e-mail from a man named Todd Costa, who said he was an assistant basketball coach, and that I should do a story on Perry.

He said Perry was the most underappreciated player in Rhode Island. He said Perry was the kind of kid who would have gotten much more attention if he had gone to Hendricken or St. Ray’s, but had decided to stay in East Providence because he was loyal to his friends, the coaches and the school even though he was “a basketball talent at a football school.” Costa said Perry was an unsung hero.

But the high school basketball season was ending, and I never got to it, and that was that, just another story idea that slips by. But I kept thinking about it, not so much for what Costa had said about Perry, but for the fact he had taken the time and effort to be Perry’s advocate.

An unsung hero? What had he meant?

So there I was looking for Perry on a morning when there was supposed to be graduation practice in the gym, but by the time I got there it was too late, the practice was over and everyone was gone.

Except for one kid, who was wearing a red jersey.

Shooting by himself in the gym.

Can you say fate?

So we started talking, and he was telling me how he had been thinking of going to a Catholic school or a prep school when he came out of the eighth grade, but money hadn’t worked out and he had come here to East Providence, and how he played on the varsity as a freshman, was second-team All-State as a sophomore. And how back then basketball was everything, the only thing he wanted to do.

Then he said something that changed everything.

Said something that should be inscribed over every recreation center, every playground, every gym, every place kids chase the game and dream their dreams; every place where the game both nourishes and takes away too many kids chasing after false gods and dreams that have no chance to come true.

“Basketball is just something I do now,” he said. “It’s not what I am. And I know I’m not going to do it forever.”

The words hung there in the empty old gym with the red banners on the wall.

I know I’m not going to do it forever.

It has become one of the cruel myths, this sense that all dreams come true if you only dream big enough. Especially when the dreams are to play in the NBA, or to go off to the bright lights of Division I, dreams that too often become the basketball equivalent of hoping that one day you’re going to win the lottery.

It’s the reason why John Thompson used to keep a deflated basketball on his desk at Georgetown, a visible reminder that one day the ball stops bouncing, and no one’s immune.

“How did you figure that out?’ I asked.

“I see my stepfather and my uncles. I see how hard they work,” Perry said. “I see how hard they work and I see how little they have to show for it.”

He paused a beat.

“And I see guys who went to college, and got a degree, and I see that they sit in offices, and have careers,” he said. “That’s what I want. I want a career.”

He went on to say how one day he had helped his father set up the Convention Center for a trade show, tough work that had left him exhausted, and how he realized “I don’t want to do this every day.”

This awareness also coincided with his sense a year ago that his basketball world was changing.

“People my age were getting college letters and I wasn’t getting any,” he said. “I thought, ‘What do I have to do?’ But I didn’t have the big-name school on my back.”

This is another reality most kids face, one that too often hits them with all the suddenness of running into a blindside pick. Here they are dreaming their dreams, but now what?

In Perry’s case, it was not making All-State as a junior. It was the feeling that all of the attention was going to kids he knew from around the state, kids he knew he was as good as, but who played on better teams. “I sat down with Bobby and told him that I was going to do everything I could do to help him, because I cherished having the opportunity to coach him,” said Alex Butler, the East Providence basketball coach. “But that he had to do his part, too. He had to do well in school, and be ready when his chance came.”

It eventually came.

Not with Division I offers, and seductive promises to come play in big arenas. Not in schoolyard dreams of some steppingstone to the riches of the NBA.

In the fall, Perry will be going to Wheaton.

“See this ball?” he said, pointing to the basketball in his hands, as we sat in the bleachers. “This is the reason I’m going to college.”

And he has come to learn that sports are not an end in themselves, but should lead to something else. A lesson he learned when he realized that he wasn’t going to have basketball forever.

“I went to a family function, and everyone was telling me that now I have a chance and to make the most of it,” said Bobby Perry. “I see my whole family living with regret. And I don’t want that to be me some day.”

He’s off to a good start.

The unsung hero.

breynold@projo.com