Who knows where a dream really starts?

Maybe it’s with the father, who once brought his own baseball dreams with him to a Texas college but hurt his arm shortly afterward, and went back home, the dream as dead as childhood.

Maybe it was when his son was about seven, playing T-ball, and his wife talked him into coaching the team, even when he didn’t want to.

Maybe it was because baseball was always a huge part of his life, so it was only natural that his son would grow up around the game, being the bat boy on his father’s softball team, which often traveled around Texas, coming of age living baseball; all of this happening in southeast Texas, where baseball is as much a part of the landscape as the summer heat.

Or maybe it’s all of it, all part of the same mosaic that now has Clay Buchholz pitching for the PawSox and being hailed as a can’t-miss prospect, the rising star of the Red Sox organization, someone who one day soon is going to pitch in the big leagues.

“I’ve been around a lot of great athletes,” says Skip Buchholz, “and I could see when he was seven years old that Clay had been very blessed.”

So it began.

Skip Buchholz was going to make his son Clay a baseball player. The son would have the career the father never had, the dream being passed through the generations as if it were a family heirloom.

“I taught him all he knows,” he says, his Texas roots in his speech. “I raised him to be a shortstop, but once he became a pitcher we did it the right way. I shortened his motion, made him tight. I didn’t allow him to throw a curveball until he was in high school.”

And from the beginning, Skip knew his son had a gift. He could run. He could throw. Games seem to come easy to him. And maybe the most important thing of all? He loved it.

Skip remembers the day when Clay was about 10 and he was hitting ground balls to him in the sports complex in their Lumberton, Texas, hometown, a place where there were seven or so fields. It was one of those scorching southeast Texas summer days, and Clay’s mother Robin was playing first base. Over and over, Skip would hit ground balls, and over and over Clay would throw the ball across the diamond to his mother.

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

They looked around and saw fields.

Empty fields.

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

That was always the dream, the prize that lay out there in the distance like some Emerald City, that very American dream of making it some day. Of moving far beyond the parched fields of his youth. Of moving to the big stadiums where they play the big games under the big lights. The ultimate sandlot fantasy, as old as the game itself.

So imagine Skip’s surprise the time when Clay was in high school and went out for football.

“I had a fit, man,” he says.

Truth be told, Clay was good at football, too, good enough to get some interest from Purdue as a wide receiver. In baseball, he was All-State for two years, then was drafted out of Angelina Junior College in Texas in 2005, taken in the first round by the Red Sox, the same draft that also got them Jacoby Ellsbury and Craig Hansen.

Last year, he breezed through three Class A leagues, already on the fast track. He started this season at Double-A Portland, and now is with the PawSox. And everywhere he’s been, the scouting report is the same: can’t miss. A potential ace of a major-league staff. The sky’s the limit.

So, the obvious question to Skip Buchholz: Are you surprised it all seems to be coming so quickly for your son?

“Not really,” he says. “I know he’s my kid and all, but he’s one in a thousand. I’ve always known that. Right from the beginning. He has a gift. The Lord blessed him.”

The night before, Clay Buchholz had stood in the PawSox’ locker room, looking younger than 22, all lean and lanky. He had struck out nine over seven innings, another night when you could almost see the lights of Fenway off in the distance, so close they must seem like they’re winking at him.

He had said that getting to the major leagues became a realistic goal when the scouts started coming to see him in junior college, but then he had smiled and said, “But if you ask my father, he’d probably say it was when I was seven years old.”

He knows he’s close now, though; that he’s already come so very, very far from fielding ground balls in the Texas heat when he was 10 years old, so very far from when he was just starting out, him and his father setting out to chase a dream. Back when that dream must have seemed as far away as the moon.

And after every game, the first thing he does is call his father, who watches the games on the Internet, because “my father always has been my coach.”

“That’s our routine,” says Skip Buchholz.

For it’s still a family thing, no question about it, all orchestrated by this father who raised Clay Buchholz to be a baseball player, to be the kind of player he never was, and now sees his son poised on the brink of the major leagues, the dream so close he can almost reach out and touch it.

breynold@projo.com