PROVIDENCE — Joey Accaoui stepped onto the polished court in The Dunk last night.

And also into the middle of a dream.

The schedule might have said that Vermont was playing Providence College, but it was a lot more than that for Accaoui. It was part homecoming, part validation, the symbolic moment when a 5-foot-10 kid who grew up in the virtual shadow of PC proved that he really did overcome all the odds.

Because by every standard of measure Joey Accaoui was not supposed to be playing against the Friars last night, was not supposed to be a Division I player, period. Too small. Too slow. Too white. Too something. They were words that all but followed him around like a shadow, words he never listened to, words that eventually became the opponents he had to overcome in his improbable quest to become a Division I basketball player.

“He’s Rocky,” says Mike Hart, who coached him at St. Andrew’s. “When he first got here he was a little roly-poly kid with heavy feet. But no one ever worked harder than him.”

But it was even more than that last night, even more than the fact Accaoui is a wonderful testimony to what it takes to make dreams come true.

It was that Accaoui was playing against the Friars, the team he not only always cheered for, but grew up with many of the PC players as his friends. The first was John Linehan, whom Accaoui first met at the Bryant basketball camp when he was 12 years old.

“I gave him a call shortly afterwards and the relationship just grew,” he says. “He was around the house all the time. I would go to his games, and he would go to mine. He was a major, major role model for me. Even now, he calls me after all my games.”

Linehan wasn’t the only Friar he befriended, though. Ruben Garces. Ryan Gomes. Tim Welsh. Bob Walsh, the former PC assistant who is now the Rhode Island College coach.

“I knew all of them,” he said. “I was always in their gym.”

But being friends with PC players and being a gym rat was one thing. Becoming a player himself was another. And when he first went to St. Andrew’s as a freshman he heard he wasn’t even going to make the varsity, never mind be ticketed for stardom. So he knew at 15 that if he was ever going to be a basketball player it always would be an uphill climb, that he simply would have to work harder than anyone else.

It’s a work ethic he learned from his parents, who came here from Lebanon as teenagers.

“My father came here when he was 16 with five dollars in his pocket,” Accaoui says. “My mother came here as a student when she was 18.”

They both believed in hard work and education, two things they pushed.

And Accaoui took those lessons and made them an article of his faith. He worked and worked, then worked some more. He played with very good players at St. Andrew’s. In short, he was in a very competitive environment and he took advantage of it.

For the journey from being a 5-foot-10 kid who grew up in North Providence to playing against the Friars last night in the Dunk is not an easy one. It came with basketball camps and AAU trips. It came with van rides and shooting by himself in the summer when everyone else was at the beach. It’s all the things no one ever sees. Chasing a dream always carries a price tag.

“I dedicated my life to the dream of playing college basketball,” he said. “But my parents’ lesson always was that nothing is ever going to be given to you.”

Not when you’re 5-foot-10 and you want to be taken seriously by college recruiters.

Not when you don’t fit the template, and all the jumpers you make aren’t going to change that.

But by the time he was a junior at St. Andrew’s, it was becoming apparent Accaoui would have a chance to play Division I college basketball. Not a sure thing by any means. But a chance.

“We kept raising the bar and he kept reaching it,” said Hart.

Vermont offered him a scholarship late in his senior year, the last one they were giving out that year. The next day he and his parents drove up there and he accepted it, his mother in tears.

A dream come true.

He was playing in the Dunk last night against the team he grew up rooting for, Rocky with a jump shot.

And he knows that his success didn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a village to raise a child? It took a basketball village to raise Accaoui, from Armand Batastini at St. Pius, to Hart and John O’Shea at St. Andrew’s, to Bob Walsh. All coached him along the way, all had a piece of Accaoui playing in The Dunk last night, playing in the middle of a dream.

If real life were Hollywood he would have hit the game-winning shot last night.

No such luck.

He scored four points in 25 minutes as Vermont got blown out.

No matter.

Joey Accaoui already had won long before last night’s game started.