PROVIDENCE — Designated hitter Conor Reardon can recall the exact moment when he felt he had returned to the Brown University baseball team after a two-year absence. It was Saturday, March 1, the seventh inning of the second game of a doubleheader at the University of Alabama Birmingham, Brown trailing, 6-5.

With shortstop Matt Nuzzo on first after a leadoff single, Reardon, who had already doubled twice and walked, swung at a 3-2 pitch and hit a chopper toward the second-base hole. As Reardon hustled toward first, he prayed the ball would get through to the outfield. But the second baseman made a diving stop and knelt up to throw.

Reardon grimaced and did what most runners these days do when desperate. He launched himself in a headfirst dive to the bag.

“I was safe by this much,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger an inch apart.

His teammates cheered from the bench while Reardon laughed at the fact that he had beaten out an infield chopper. “That was a very cool feeling,” he said. But when he stood to dust himself off, his right leg gave out, and he collapsed.

So ended Conor Reardon’s day, but it was only the beginning of a remarkable season. Playing on a gimpy right leg, the result of a freak Thanksgiving eve accident in 2005, Reardon appeared in 40 games this season and finished first on the team and fifth in the Ivy League with a .395 batting average. He had 62 hits in 157 at-bats, scored 30 runs, drove in 25 and belted 10 doubles and one home run. He worked his way around the bases at little more than a power walk.

“I can’t push off my right leg,” he said.

That Reardon put on a Brown uniform again is a tribute to Jeff Dietz, the 2007 Ivy League pitcher of the year, who nagged him last fall to try; to coach Marek Drabinski, who took a chance on a player who can’t run; to teammates who ignored the fact that he was a hitter and nothing else, and to Reardon himself, who shook off two years of baseball rust for one last hurrah.

“I’ve probably played on 30 teams, and the people on this team are so much more enjoyable. Every game, every practice. I’m going to miss them as much as I miss baseball,” he said. “Winning four games from Yale, winning two games on senior day, I think we went out on a pretty good note.”

Reardon was valedictorian of his class at Branford High School in Connecticut and a four-year starter and two-time captain on the baseball team. He showed promise at Brown, hitting .286 in 16 games as a freshman second baseman and .500 during fall ball as a sophomore. He was excited about the spring of 2006.

But his life changed the night before Thanksgiving. He was leaving a friend’s house to pick up his brother when he saw his car was blocked. He found the driver and asked him to back out. Just as the driver was preparing to do so, Reardon noticed a tail light on his car illuminated and stepped in to check the trunk lock. Suddenly, the other car lurched forward, pinning Reardon’s right leg just below the knee between the bumpers for a few seconds.

“It was pretty painful,” he said.

His lower leg swelled and prevented him from driving, so he called his parents. When they got home, his mother Judy, a nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, suspected he was suffering from acute compartment syndrome, which is sudden massive bleeding in the muscles that causes them to swell within their encasements, or compartments. They rushed him to the hospital, where he was examined, given painkillers and wheeled into surgery for 4 ½ hours.

An orthopedic surgeon opened Reardon’s calf and left it open to relieve the swelling. Reardon spent 11 days in the hospital and had three subsequent operations to close the incisions. Two zipper-like scars run down his leg from just below the knee to just above the ankle.

Despite months of rehab and visits to specialists, Reardon never recovered. A doctor at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, considered a stop of last resort for orthopedics and rheumatology patients, told him that his calf muscle was a latticework of scar tissue, that he had suffered nerve damage and there was really nothing to be done.

Reardon returned to Brown and for the rest of his sophomore year and his junior year hobbled to class and “wrote a lot, drank a lot and mostly hung out. I didn’t do much for two years.”

That changed last fall, when he took a journalism class and wrote a paper about Dietz, the pitching star of Brown’s 2007 Ivy League championship team who had signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Dietz urged Reardon to drop by Murray Stadium and take batting practice. Since his injury Reardon had not swung more than a Wiffle Ball bat, but he accepted Dietz’s offer and was stunned that he could still hit a baseball.

A few days later, Readon hit again, Drabinski saw him and asked if he wanted to play. Reardon thought he was kidding. But the coach asked again when Reardon interviewed him for his Dietz paper, and the next day he was in uniform against UConn-Avery Point. He pinch hit in the fifth inning and sent the left fielder to the warning track. He singled in his next at-bat.

He played three fall games, hitting safely, meandering to first base, as he put it, and leaving for a pinch runner. Drabinski urged him to work out all winter and to swing a bat to prepare for a good spring. It didn’t seem to matter that when Brown went to Alabama or Florida “they weren’t going to let me have a courtesy runner.”

Reardon didn’t need one, as he more than held his own. He was 3-for-3 in that UAB game and had four hits in games against Hartford and Columbia. He has 20 multi-hit games, was held hitless only seven games and finished his career with an 18-game hitting streak. His father even saw a stat that indicated he was the fifth-toughest strikeout in college baseball. Reardon credits hitting coach Bill Cilento for some of that success.

Now it’s over. Reardon will pick up his degree in history on May 25 and next fall begin a two-year commitment with Teach for America. He will be based in Connecticut.

“This was a great bunch of guys to hang out with,” he said of the 2008 Bears, who finished with a 20-24 record.

mszostak@projo.com