would have spent winters playing hoops at Concordia rather than honing his routes and improving his speed. If the Vikings didn't hold training camp at Minnesota State, they may have taken a chance on a different minicamp long shot.

"If he goes to that combine and runs a 4.5, you never hear about Adam Thielen," Nielsen said. "That's really the only thing that got him his shot."

Maybe, though, there aren't more like him. It took doggedness for Thielen to attend the combine, and if that didn't work out, he would have tried something else. His natural athletic skills, while not obvious, are special. And eventually, his speed and strength caught up.

"There's a ton of guys like that," Langford said. "Adam separates himself from those guys because he finds away."

Work, luck, resilience, opportunity - it all came together to make Thielen a wide receiver on the team he grew up loving. As a boy, he pretended he was Randy Moss and Cris Carter and Jake Reed. Now, small-town Minnesota kids pretend they're Adam Thielen.

His son is a millionaire now, but Peter Thielen still works in construction. He raises metal buildings - residential, commercial, garages, whatever. It's a busy time of year, trying to finish jobs before the northern Minnesota winter rushes in. As he was driving to a site Wednesday afternoon, he tried to explain what it is like to see everything that has happened.

"It brings tears to your eyes sometimes," he said.

This article was written by Adam Kilgore, a reporter for The Washington Post.