PAWTUCKET — I first met Clay Buchholz last August, a month before he threw a no-hitter at Fenway Park and his world changed, back before his life got showered in pixie dust.

But even then, he already was so close to his dream that he could almost reach out and touch it.

Once it had been his father’s dream, then passed down to Clay like some precious stone, a dream that got nurtured on all the parched southeastern Texas infields of his childhood.

Consider the story his father, Skip, told me a year ago.

Clay was about 10 and his father was hitting ground balls to him in the sports complex of their hometown of Lumberton, Texas, a place where there are seven or so fields. It was a brutally hot day and his parents were working Clay out.

“What do you see?” Skip Buchholz asked his wife and son. “When you look around, what do you see?”

They looked around and saw empty fields.

“That’s why you’re going to make it someday,” Skip Buchholz said. “Because you’re the only one here.”

So that was the dream that dominated his adolescence, the one that was always sitting off in the distance like some magical wonderland, a Baseball Oz, so far from the sandlot world he was coming of age in on those dusty fields of southeast Texas. He was going to make it. He was going to come out of a small Texas town and make it all the way to the bright lights and the big games. Forget the odds.

And by the time I first met him last August in the PawSox’ clubhouse, it was as if he already could see those Fenway lights winking at him. Everyone said he was a “childhood dream all but jumped into his lap.”

“Everything changed that one night,” he said.

He was standing in the same spot yesterday in the PawSox’ clubhouse, as he had been last August, here as part of a rehab assignment, having been impressive in four innings Saturday night. But that’s the only thing that’s the same as last August.

“I didn’t realize the ramifications at the time of the no-hitter,” he said.

How could he have?

He had just turned 23, in only his second major-league start, and already he had his little slice of baseball immortality.

At the most obvious level, it made him a celebrity in Boston, unable anymore to go anywhere in obscurity anymore. Fans. Media. The general public. Buchholz is known now in ways that were almost unimaginable to him just a year ago.

“Guys old enough to be my father will come up and ask for autographs,” he said with a bemused smile on his face. “It’s sort of weird.”

That’s the thing about celebrity. The organization can tell you all about it, can give you tips on how to deal with the media, and how to deal with the public, but until it happens to you it’s all uncharted territory. So it is with Buchholz, who knows that that one night last September, that one night when he became one of the best stories of last year’s Red Sox season, made him cross a line from which there is no turning back.

“You’re under a magnifying glass in ways you never were before,” he said.

In a sense, he’s in a strange place, still trying to prove he is ready to be an effective starter in the major leagues, yet someone who has thrown a no-hitter. Still trying to prove he can live up to all the hype that’s surrounded him since he’s been in the Red Sox’ organization, yet a name that everyone knows, complete with two endorsements already, symbolic of a certain cachet.

He said he doesn’t really feel any pressure, that there’s always been a certain pressure, always were some people back in his small Texas town that said he would never make it. He says this matter-of-factly, as if it’s long been part of his life, the price tag for having a dream when you’re a kid, the price tag for everyone knowing your business and having an opinion on it.

But he’s also come to learn that when you’re pitching for the Red Sox and you’re not pitching well “you are going to hear about it.”

He is 2-3 in this young season, has had some excellent outings, some not so good. He knows he has to get more consistent, throw more strikes, go after hitters more. All things virtually all young pitchers must get better at, the things that come with experience.

For it’s not about talent with Buchholz.

“It’s kind of a live-and-learn experience,” he said.

Uncharted waters.

Like his life has been ever since he threw the no-hitter last September and his world changed.

Still, he also knows that he’s right in the middle of his childhood dream, and how many people can say that?

“There’s not a word to describe it,” he says.

For this is the life he long ago mapped out for himself, the dream his father once passed down to him, the one he began chasing as a young kid and never looked back.

The one that has now taken him to places he only used to fantasize about, bright lights and big games, a world that once upon a time must have seemed as a far away as the stars in the nighttime sky.

“We didn’t have the luxury of having a lot of things when we were young,” says Clay Buchholz. “This is a completely different lifestyle.”

Yes, it is.

One in which your childhood dream all but jumps in your lap.

breynold@projo.com