Chris Burns was a senior in high school when he first discovered that sports aren’t always fair.

He was the New Hampshire player of the year then, and he figured that was going to mean something, the kind of honor that was going to separate him from so many others, the kind of honor that was going to get him a college scholarship, the first significant step in his dream of becoming a college basketball player.

Until it wasn’t.

“The only offers I had were all Division III,” he said. “I was surprised.”

Welcome to the Darwinian world of college recruiting, where one of the cruel realities is that when you play high school basketball in places like New Hampshire — and Rhode Island, too — you’re always battling the stereotype that the competition isn’t good enough, that what you did at that level is somehow invalidated, doesn’t count. The perception that there is high school basketball and there is college basketball and they exist in parallel universes.

That’s what happened to Burns, anyway, in his senior year in 2002. He believed he was good enough to play in America East, but even though there was some initial talk with the University of New Hampshire, it never went anywhere. But what hurt the most was that the three Division II schools in New Hampshire never even contacted him, even though St. Anselm’s was only a jump shot away from where he lived in Merrimac.

“It was extremely frustrating,” he said. “I knew I could play at that level, but it was like no one cared.”

He thought about going to prep school for a year, another year to audition for colleges. Then one day that summer he went with a friend to a basketball camp at Providence College, where, as fate would have it, he caught the eye of Bob Walsh, then one of Tim Welsh’s assistants at PC. Walsh convinced Burns to come to PC as a “walk-on,” basketball parlance for a non-scholarship player.

“Walk-on” has become almost a dirty word in college basketball today, the ultimate perjorative. “Walk-on” means the faceless kids at the end of the bench who come in for the last minute of garbage time, the ones who seem to exist in some lost netherworld — on the team but not really on it. “Walk-on” means you can’t play.

That’s the stereotype, anyway, and no matter that it’s often more complicated than that. No matter that “walk- ons” like Kareem Hayletts and Ray Cross have played significant minutes for PC in recent years. This was the insular world Burns joined in the fall of 2002, a blond kid at the end of the bench, little more than a public afterthought on a Friar team that went to the NIT that year. But in practice, Walsh, now the coach of Rhode Island College, always looked after Burns, liked him as a player.

“I love coach Walsh,” Burns says. “He always kept me involved.”

It was a PC team of Ryan Gomes and Marcus Douthit, Sheiku Kabba and Donnie McGrath. Burns went up against them every day, knew that his game was getting better, that the PC practices were his own basketball laboratory, a basketball world far away from the small gyms of New Hampshire high school games. These weren’t practices where he was the best player, like he’d been in high school. These were practices where if you didn’t bring it every day you would get embarrassed, dog eat dog.

“That year really developed my game,” he says. “It helped me develop my outside shot, because that was the only way I could stay competitive in practice.”

By the end of that year he had come to believe that if he stayed at PC he would eventually get some playing time. But there were no guarantees, and he wanted to play right away, not wait for some future that might never arrive. So, with Walsh’s help, he began shopping himself to Division II schools in New England — specifically Bryant, Stonehill and Assumption.

“Bob Walsh told us that Chris was someone we should take a look at,” remembers Bryant coach Max Good.

So in the fall of 2003, Burns showed up at Bryant.

And from the beginning he was like some unexpected gift who showed up on Max Good’s doorstep. For the simple truth is this: to be good in Division I you need future pros on your team. To be good in Division II you need a few guys who could have played in Division I.

Burns is one of those players.

He was rookie of the year in the Northeast-10. The next year, in the national championship game against Virginia Union, he had 24 points and was the MVP of the game. This year, he’s averaging nearly 16 points a game and has had more than 100 3-pointers.

In a game against Syracuse in the Carrier Dome in November he had 33 points. In short, he’s had the kind of career he always thought he could have had if only someone would give him a chance.

And what has he learned from all this?

“In the beginning, it was like I had to play Division I, had to prove I could play at that level,” he says. “I’ve learned that there are basketball players at every level.”

And he knows that coming to Bryant was the best thing that could have happened to him, this place that gave him a second chance — a second chance to get his validation, a second chance to get the kind of career he always thought he could have back there in his senior year in high school when he first learned that sports are not always fair.

“I’ve proved I could play,” says Chris Burns.

Yes, he has.

breynold@projo.com