This is the other side of NFL Draft weekend.

This is the other side of the attention and the interviews and all the promise, all the glamour of an event that’s become a significant part of the American sports scene. The weekend when so many football dreams come true, all those dreams born in some sandlot somewhere, dreams that get actualized with being drafted to play in the NFL.

This is the other side of the story.

A story about waiting for your cellphone to ring, waiting for your dreams to come true.

Liam Coen’s story.

And like all stories, it started a long time ago, years before last weekend’s draft, back when Coen was just a kid chasing the football dream, a kid who could always throw a football, could always put it where he wanted it to go.

It was an ability that took him to La Salle Academy, where he became an All-State quarterback; it got him boxes full of recruiting letters; and it got him a scholarship to UMass. He was going to play college football, and that always had been the dream.

But a funny thing happened.

He became better than anyone ever thought, himself included. This past fall he ended his career as the all-time passing leader in UMass history, the kind of numbers that jump out at you. In fact, you can make a case that he was the most successful quarterback to come out of Rhode Island in the past half century, a great college career.

So he spent the winter at a workout facility in Pennsylvania where he was one of about a dozen guys all preparing for the NFL. He calls it the hardest thing he’s ever done, and by the end of it he had gone from 225 pounds to 215 and was in the best shape of his life. So by the time he worked out for NFL scouts, he thought he threw well, ran well, had done everything he could do.

Certainly that was the feedback he was getting. Just keep doing what you’re doing. That was the message. For he knew the negatives: a lack of size at just under 6-foot-2. Not a great athlete. Someone who had played 1-AA football. But he had strengths, too: he has shown he can run a team and put the ball in receivers’ hands, someone who always put up impressive numbers.

He went into last weekend figuring he might not get drafted, but that he was in the next group, referred to as preferred free agents, someone who figured to be quickly signed as a free agent and invited to a training camp.

``It became an expectation,’’ he said. ``I felt it was probably going to happen.’’

His college success had changed the equation. If once the dream had been to one day play in college, the dream he had carried so close to his heart through those high school years at La Salle, now the dream had gotten bigger. Now it had become the biggest football dream of all, the chance to one day play in the stadiums of the NFL. Now there were higher expectations.

Until the phone didn’t ring.

``It’s been terrible,’’ he said Tuesday afternoon.

The reality is that only 10 quarterbacks went in the draft, creating a domino effect. The six or seven guys who expected to get drafted became the glamour free agents, pushing Coen and the others hoping to be free agents further down the list.

 So now he’s in football limbo, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for his agent to tell him some good news, waiting.

``What happens is you start to question everything you’ve done,’’ he said. ``Should I have gone to prep school and tried to pay at a higher level? It makes you re-think everything.’’

He knew that things were deteriorating for him in the seventh round when the names of too few quarterbacks had been called. He knew then that it was going to be more difficult to get an invitation into a training camp, knew then that the odds were growing longer.

So now what?

The one thing Coen knows is he’s not ready to put the pads away for good, not with the echoes of all those college cheers all but ringing in his head. For how do you walk away from something that’s been such a part of your life? How do you walk away from something that you’ve been doing since you were a little kid, your head full of all those sports dreams?

That’s the other side of the NFL Draft weekend, the one we rarely see. We see the ones whose names were called, the few whose careers get a chance to go on to the NFL, the anointed ones.

The others?

The ones who wait for that phone call that doesn’t come? The ones whose dreams just got punctured like some big balloon poked by a sharp stick?

We rarely see them.

``I’m going to give it a year,’’ Coen said.

The best-case scenario, of course, is the phone will still ring. He says he would consider going to play in Canada. If not, there’s the chance of being signed in the fall to what’s called a ``future’s contract,’’ football parlance for signing players for the next year.

As of now, it’s all a little unclear, all mixed in with the hurt and disappointment, the reality that this no longer about Saturday afternoon cheers. That this is now a business that can be as cold as a loan shark’s heart.

``I can deal with it if I go into a camp and am simply overwhelmed by it,’’ said Coen. ``If I go into a camp and am simply not good enough, I can live with that. I just want a chance.’’

So the dream continues.

Even if it’s now more complicated.