01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 19, 2006

I met Sean Kelly four years ago.

He was a senior at Wheeler School then, had recently concluded an outstanding prep school basketball career, a blue-collar kid from Providence who had flourished at an East Side private school. He even had written a memoir as a senior project, one about coming of age as a basketball player in Providence, the adjustment to the culture shock he found at Wheeler in the beginning.

But what impressed me the most about Kelly that day was that he wasn't delusional about basketball, unlike so many high school stars. That even though

he'd grown up in the shadow of Providence College, complete with the childhood dream of one day playing for the Friars, when it came time to deal with his basketball future he was extremely realistic about it.

"I always wanted Division I college basketball," he said then. "That was my dream."

In a sense, it's the dream of every kid who has ever made two shots in a row. Division I is Shangri-la, the place where the big cheers are, the college basketball that gets attention. Division I is Oz off there in the distance somewhere, seductive, enticing, the place everyone wants to get to, shimmering through the mist.

Everything else?

Is everything else.

"You grow up with it," Kelly said. "It's all around you. You don't see any D-three games on TV."

He was only 5-foot-11, though, and even though he could see Brown from his school, they weren't recruiting him. Nor was anyone else in Division I.

"You always hear you're too small, too something," he said that day four years ago. "You feel like you always have to prove yourself."

But by the time his senior year at Wheeler was over, he had arrived at a decision: Instead of dwelling on his basketball dreams that weren't going to come true, he would focus on those that could. He would scale down his dreams, adjust them to his new reality. He would go to Wheaton, a Division III school that wanted him. He would go to Wheaton where he would have a great chance to play. He'd come to realize that playing college basketball was a gift, especially when you're under 6 feet and you come from Rhode Island. Even if it's not in some big arena, the childhood dream.

Now it's four years later.

He ended his career a couple of weeks ago.

And it's more than the fact Kelly had a great career at Wheaton. That he started all four years. That he broke the school's all-time assist record. That for four years he walked around campus and everyone knew who he was, a built-in identity. That he had the kind of college basketball experience that few local kids so rarely have.

It's that he has it in perspective.

Then again, he always did.

Maybe that was because when he was just a young kid playing AAU he saw the older kids with their big dreams, the kids that had so much invested in those dreams, only to see them crash when they didn't come true. Maybe it was because he realized relatively early that, though basketball was hugely important, it wasn't the only thing. In a sense, it was why he had gone to Wheeler, leaving his middle-class world to one where kids went to the Caribbean on vacations.

So by the time he decided to go to Wheaton, he knew you could use basketball, it didn't have to use you. Knew that basketball already had opened up his world, and he used it as a passport.

"It's not always about basketball," he said. "Basketball is just a part of the equation. It's about finding an environment you can thrive in. And I put myself in a situation where I knew I was going to play."

That, too, was key.

Many kids put themselves in situations where playing time is uncertain, a built-in frustration. Kelly knew four years ago an important fact of basketball life, one that many kids don't learn until it's too late: that the benches of Division I school are full of unhappy kids. He'd been around basketball culture long enough to know that it's more fun to play in Division III than sit on the bench in Division II; more fun to play than sit, period.

Wheaton has been a great experience, everything he could have hoped for. And if he's proved he could have played at a higher level? That doesn't bother him.

"I think people know that," he said. "And that's enough for me."

Three weeks ago, Wheaton played in a tournament game against WPI in Worcester. They were down big at halftime, lost by 14. At the time Kelly thought it was going to be the last college game he'd ever play.

Is this how it all ends, he asked himself moments afterward. Getting beat on the road in a game you never were really in? Is this how it all ends, all the hours spent playing as a kid, all the van rides to AAU games, all the practices and bus rides in high school, all the hopes and dreams that always are there in your gym bag right there with your sneakers, through all the hours and all the years of playing in college, all of the incredible emotional investment a career is?

This is how it ends?

Because careers always end. Every one of them. And the overwhelming majority of them end like Kelly thought his had, in a loss, in frustration, look up at the clock and it's suddenly all over. All the years. All of it.

Over.

"I cried in the locker room afterwards," Kelly said. "I had images of every gym I had ever played in. It all came rushing at me."

But he got a reprieve.

Wheaton qualified for the ECAC Division III Tournament. Two more games. One last home game, in which Kelly scored his 1,000th point. One game in Providence, where Wheaton beat Rhode Island College, a few blocks from where he grew up, a game in which Kelly had a school-record 13 assists. Somehow it all seemed fitting, everything ending where it once had began. Like one big circle. One big circle that had changed everything.

"It was just perfect," said Sean Kelly. "It couldn't have ended any better."

Four years after he made the right decision for himself.

breynold@projo.com / (401) 277-7340