I first met Joe Mazzulla four years ago at Rainone Gym in Johnston, so very far from the NCAA Tournament where he now lives.

He was just a sophomore at Hendricken then, but already the word was out on him. He was going to be the state’s next great schoolboy basketball player, but even then he had bigger dreams than that.

It was why he was at Hendricken in the first place, even though his uncle was the boys coach in Johnston and his father was the girls coach, even though his grandfather had been the town’s longtime athletic director, and the Mazzulla name ran through the town like Route 295. Even though for him not to go to Johnston High School was seen by many at the time as a form of civic heresy.

But he wanted to be a big-time college player one day.

That was the dream, and he chased it, chased it through summer camps and AAU tournaments, chased it in endless hours in small gyms like the one in Johnston, places where you spend the hours playing imaginary games in your head, complete with imaginary cheers.

“This is my life,” he said that morning. “This is what I do.”

So he would get up at 5:30 each morning in order to go to the Wal-Mart on Plainfield Pike, where he’d catch the bus to Hendricken, the beginning of a day that often didn’t see him return home until 7 at night.

The summer before, he had played well at a showcase camp in New Jersey, the kind of camp that gets attention from recruiters, and so he already was living inside that little bubble of high school fame.

But all of that was still to come that morning in the little gym in Johnston four years ago, the recruiting, the expectations, the pressure. It was almost as if he lived inside the game’s promise then.

But the game can be a cruel lover, and the road to the big arenas and big cheers that Mazzulla was trying to get to back then is littered with broken dreams and crushed hopes. It’s a very long way from Rainone Gym to Madison Square Garden, as far away as the moon.

The next time we talked was two years later.

He was a senior at Hendricken then, the best player in the state, but already things were more complicated. The year before had been awful, Mazzulla feeling like he was always under some microscope, that everyone was always judging him and he was never enough. He had learned that nothing comes without a price tag, not even high school fame.

“I felt like everything was collapsing in on me at once,” he said of his junior year in high school. “I felt like everything was going downhill.”

It was so bad that he was going to forget his senior year at Hendricken and sign with a prep school instead.

“How come you didn’t do it?” I asked.

“I didn’t have a pen,” he said.

He came back to have a great senior year at Hendricken. He had committed to West Virginia, after PC didn’t want him, and he thought URI didn’t really want him. So he was going to the Big East, no matter what anyone thought, and that took the pressure off. Then he hit a jumper at the buzzer to win the state title, ending one of the best high school careers we’ve had around here.

But, in a sense, his basketball journey was just beginning. Certainly, the stakes were changing.

Mazzulla was the first Rhode Island kid to go directly from the Interscholastic League to the Big East, a basketball version of the bends. And it wasn’t always easy. It was a long way from taking it to the hoop against Cranston West. He was a bit player for West Virginia, some minutes one night, less the next night.

Last year he came into The Dunk against the Friars, picked up a quick foul, then went back to the bench for most of the game as the Friars won.

You can’t go home again?

Not if you can’t get in the game.

This year has been different.

He’s been in the rotation all year, had 11 points in 32 minutes in early February as West Virginia came in here and beat the Friars. A month ago, two West Virginia players were quoted as saying Mazzulla was the toughest guy on the team, and it wasn’t even close.

Then came last Saturday, a second-round game against Duke, the biggest game of his life.

All he did was amass 13 points, 11 rebounds and 8 assists. All he did was have Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski say that he was the most valuable player in the game. All he did was have CBS call him West Virginia’s MVP, giving him more face time after the game than anyone else, the camera following him as if it were a home movie.

And there he was Sunday morning in the New York Times, columnist William Rhoden writing, “Joe Mazzulla is my new favorite player in the NCAA Tournament.”

All the stuff dreams are made of.

And all I could think about as I watched him Saturday was that morning in that small gym in Johnston four years ago, back when it was all ahead of him, a big-time college just a dream off in the distance somewhere, and how very far he’s come. How he now lives in a place where few Rhode Island kids have ever gone, the Round of 16 in the NCAA Tournament. How here he is now, in the middle of the biggest stage there is in college basketball, his childhood dream in the palm of his hand.

breynold@projo.com