Green Bay Packer Will Blackmon returned to his Bishop Hendricken roots Friday and his talk to the students wasn’t what you’d expect.

AP / Mike Roemer

WARWICK — They say you can’t go home again?

Will Blackmon did on Friday, two days before his number would be retired by his former high school.

Back to where it all began, this football journey that’s seen him go from playing in the Interscholastic League to the NFL, this incredible journey that no one could have predicted back when he entered Hendricken as a ninth grader in the fall of 1998.

For there he was Friday, standing in Hendricken’s old gym, standing in front of the junior class, standing in front of a sea of kids with their blue blazers, the former graduate returning to tell them. … tell them what?

Tell them what it felt like to be one of a handful of minority kids back in his freshman year, tell them how he sat in the cafeteria by himself his first day feeling like he’d parachuted into some strange country, around more white people than he’d ever been around in his life?

Tell them that it wasn’t just that the other students were white, it was also that they had money, seemed to wear it, the kind of money he did not have, the kind of money that spoke to a world he knew nothing about?

Tell them that he absolutely hated it, didn’t think he could stay, but then Ron Mosca, the football coach, took him down to the locker room to show him some football equipment, and that was the beginning?

Tell them that it was football that became the icebreaker at Hendricken, this game he had played all his life, first for the West Elmwood Intruders in Providence, this game that’s still the same game he’s played forever, even though he now plays for the Green Bay Packers?

Tell them that he’d been really quiet when he first had come here to school, the kind of kid who just observed, trying to figure things out and how he was going to fit in?

Tell them that even at 16 years old, when he knew football was going to take him to college, he knew that you only get one chance with the game, and that this was his?

What was he supposed to tell them?

He was wearing jeans and a gray sweatshirt, a black baseball cap on his head, so different than the students in front of him with their jackets and ties. And yet, in some ways, not so different either. For once upon a time he had been just like them, just another kid in this same school with everything all ahead of him.

“I never had one issue of racism here, none whatsoever,” he said.

He figured out then that even though the other students were white, they were diverse, too, diverse in that they were all different, from different towns, diverse in their own way. More important, he figured out that Hendricken was all about what he calls “life preparedness,” that it put him in a situation that he had to learn to deal with, grow from.

“But that’s what life is,” he told the students. “It’s not always about being comfortable. And once I figured it out, I liked it.”

For that’s the thing about Blackmon: he gets it.

He got it at Hendricken, when he eventually figured out that “I was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime,” where he came to realize the school prepared him to be able to adjust to whatever situation he found himself in.

He got it at Boston College, which he came to see as an extension of Hendricken, new challenges that you face the same way, one day a time, figuring it out.

He gets it now in the NFL, where he’s now been for two years.

“The average career in the NFL is something like two and a half years,” Blackmon said, “so it’s clear football isn’t going to last forever.”

Think about that remark. Roll it around on your tongue for a while. It’s a remark that should be in every locker room in this country. Football isn’t going to last forever. The sad fact is that too many kids think sports are going to last forever, have been led to believe that to make the pros is to somehow have some lasting ticket to the good life, that nothing else matters.

Blackmon knows better. Maybe it’s because he knows the contracts are not guaranteed, and one injury, a few bad games and your career can end in a hurry, yesterday’s news. Maybe that’s because he has a friend who was drafted ahead of him who is now out of football, lying on the couch at home wondering what happened to his life. Maybe that’s because he’s only been in the NFL two years and already has seen innumerable guys come and go, the revolving door that is professional sports.

So he told the Hendricken kids that he’s already started a clothing line with a former Hendricken teammate, told them that he’s thinking of going back to school to get an MBA, maybe go to law school. “I have so many goals,” Blackmon said

“What’s been your best moment in the NFL?” one kid asked him.

The odds-on choice was that he would say the game last season when he returned a punt 57 yards against the Raiders and was named the NFL’s special-teams player of the week?

He didn’t.

Instead, he said it was a different game this past season, against the Cowboys, when he looked across the field and saw his cousin Deon Anderson across the field. The same Deon Anderson who also had grown up in Providence and played against him in youth football. Two kids from inner-city Providence now both in the NFL, and what had been the chance of that happening when they were kids.

“I sprinted across the field after the game and just hugged him,” he said.

For Blackmon knows that it’s not about the football, it’s about the journey.

One that, in many ways, started for him on the day he first came here and sat by himself in the cafeteria. That day when he was both scared and overwhelmed, feeling about as lost as lost could be, back when the very idea of Hendricken one day honoring him must have seemed as far away as the moon.

breynold@projo.com