In the other room, the phone began to ring, its harsh interruption wailing through a lazy Southern afternoon. A room away, Kevin Thompson slowly began to lift his 6-foot-2 frame from the seat he'd found that day in late May, striding toward the phone in a smooth, athletic gait.
The voice on the other end was only vaguely familiar.
"Kevin?"
"Yeah."
"This is Coach Franks. We want you back on the team."
The brief conversation was short and simple, but it hit like a Mike Tyson uppercut.
The old adage says opportunity comes knocking, but for Kevin Thompson, opportunity was about to beat the door down. It wasn't just Carl Franks on the other end of the line, it was redemption.
It was a second chance, a do-over, a mulligan, an opportunity to right in one final year everything that had gone wrong in the first four. Just days earlier, quarterback D. Bryant had been ruled academically ineligible, and like a modern-day Cincinnatus, Thompson had been called back into duty when his team needed him.
There were no guarantees of course, no real thoughts of even starting, yet there was a chance, an opportunity to do it all right. The chance.
But Thompson had other plans.
A wedding in the summer to fiancée Elizabeth Laing, a job in Atlanta with the Greater Atlanta Church of Christ and a new life that had more to do with Sunday mornings than Saturday afternoons lay in front of Thompson. And he was ready to move on.
For six months he had gotten himself beyond football, ready to give up the game he'd known for more years than even he could remember.
But in the beep of a dial tone, everything changed.
There was that chance, that one chance and maybe that was all it would take.
It wasn't so much that he had failed the first time around; he just never found a spot in the Fred Goldsmith system. Heavily recruited out of high school, Thompson spurned Clemson, Georgia Tech and South Carolina to suit up in Duke blue. He took a redshirt year in 1995, behind Spence Fischer, who just a season earlier had led Duke to its first bowl game of the decade.
In 1996, he played in a career-high five games, but he was just another name in the winless game of three-QB monte. Pick whichever quarterback you like, shuffle them around as you will, just don't expect the winning solution to be under any of them.
The next two seasons were worse. Thompson loved the team, but his playing time steadily dwindled to just four appearances in his last two seasons.
"I knew I could [run the team] and play well, it just didn't happen," Thompson said. "I never got the snaps, never got a groove."
So in 1999, Kevin Thompson made his last appearance in Wallace Wade, but it was a sheepskin, not a pigskin, tucked under his arm.
Then the call came.
He knew it wouldn't be the Hollywood script comeback, full of all the faux-drama of sports and complete with a 98-yard Hail Mary for the national championship, but he knew it would be a chance.
Still, like any telemarketer, Franks hadn't quite finished the sale.
But it would come.
"I just realized I had a second chance," Thompson said. "It's something I'll never get to do again. I had to talk with a lot of people, my fiancée at the time, my family and they were all behind it.
"So I went back to talk to him a week later and said, 'Coach, I'm your man. I want to compete. I know I won't start, but I want to give my heart for this team again.'"
Elizabeth Laing became Elizabeth Thompson, but the rest of his summer plans were put on hold. For one more time, Kevin Thompson was a Blue Devil.
"I loved being here, being on the team," he said. "I loved the Duke Blue Devils."
Short on glory and long on humid summer days, Thompson returned to the team as the third-string quarterback. He had missed the spring practices and immediately fell far behind Spencer Romine and Bobby Campbell.
So Thompson, whose wire-frame glasses and personality like a handshake make him a likelier candidate for Duke grad student than Duke quarterback, worked even harder. He got fewer snaps than the two incumbents, so he made them count more.
But backup quarterbacks are a walking Catch-22. Their only ticket into the game is an injury or a crash landing by the starter. And the only thing worse than not playing is losing.
Then fate made a cameo appearance in the form of Jeff Kerr and a half a ton of East Carolina linemen.
Starter Spencer Romine suffered a separated shoulder against the Pirates, and a barrage of Bobby Campbell incompletions against Northwestern thrust Thompson into the starter's role.
The chance that he didn't know if he would take and the chance that he probably should never have gotten was now Kevin Thompson's life.
And for the kid born in Gainesville, Fla., the birthplace of Airborne, it seemed like the last piece of a cosmic jigsaw puzzle.
His first appearance met with a slow start; Thompson misfired on more than half his attempts and nerves were just as prominent as his drive. But when Monday rolled around, Franks said Thompson was getting a repeat performance.
But there's an unwritten rule in sports that says starting jobs can't be lost because of injury. And when Romine returns, the Kevin Thompson saga might have its final chapter.
Yet for the resurrected quarterback-turned-Blue Devil helmsman, living his football life on borrowed time, the journey of 1,000 passes was worth more than the final snap.
"You never know what opportunities you're going to get in life," Thompson said, smiling the smile of a rescued man. "Last year I thought I was through with football, but sometimes you get a second chance and this time I did.
"What's going to happen? I don't know. I'm just going to give it all I got."
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