Lee Evans lay in bed a year ago and tried to pull in the reins on his runaway thoughts. Evans, a second-team All-American wide receiver at Wisconsin the previous fall, had said no to the NFL to return to Madison for his senior year. On the day of the 2002 NFL draft, in the course of one play -- one silly play in a meaningless game in a redundant exercise called spring football -- Evans' left knee collapsed.

Coach Barry Alvarez had kept him out of contact all spring. Evans asked him if he could play in the spring game. Alvarez met him halfway.

"I was doing radio," Alvarez said, referring to the spring game. "I said on the air, 'Lee is going to play five plays. This will be his last play.'"

	Lee Evans' left knee is getting better and he should be ready for fall practice.

Evans ran an 18-yard pattern down the sideline. He went up to catch the ball, and he landed funny. From the radio booth, Alvarez yelled, "Get up!"

"I threw the headsets off and took off," the coach said. Evans tore two ligaments and broke a lot of hearts, including his own. In the course of one play, he had gone from All-American to gimp. The only part of him that traveled fast was his mind, and Evans didn't want to go where it took him..

"Your mind goes crazy," Evans said. "You can't sleep. 'This is it. It's over. I don't even want to go through this struggle. This is too much for me. I can't bear it all.' The worst possible thoughts."

Evans had turned down the NFL to come back for his senior season. He had left seven figures on the table. He intended to be on the stage this Saturday at the Madison Square Garden Theater for the 2003 NFL draft. Commissioner Paul Tagliabue would announce his name in the first round. It is similar to the plan that Roy Williams, the Texas All-American, adopted near the end of last season. Though he probably would have been drafted in the top half of the first round on Saturday, Williams came back.

"To be the best," Williams said, by way of explanation. "Have that one shot at the national championship." The 6-foot-4, 210-pound Williams caught 64 passes for 1,142 yards and 12 touchdowns last season. He knows what happened to Evans, but Williams never considered it. In fact, his own injury, a pulled hamstring in the third game of the season, convinced him to return this fall. Williams said he made his decision as he lay on the field during Texas' 41-11 defeat of Houston. "I could not run," Williams said. "Right then and there, I decided to come back."

Evans had stayed in school for all the right reasons. The public looked at him in 2001 and saw a 20-year-old man who caught 75 passes for 1,545 yards and nine touchdowns. Evans looked in the mirror and didn't see a man at all. "It was a question of maturity, not so much from a playing perspective, but from a mental perspective," said Evans, who turned 22 in March. "Yeah, I would have had more money in my pocket but that doesn't necessarily mean I would have been happy and comfortable."

It's funny. People see an acknowledgement of immaturity, a player understanding that he's not ready for the NFL, as maturity. The money made its siren call to Williams, too. Someday, he wants a Lamborghini. For now, even at age 21, he can live without a car.

"All I have are these Nikes," Williams said, looking down at his feet. "They take me everywhere I want to go. Traffic-less." Williams isn't much for traffic, as befits his Odessa, Texas, upbringing, and, as Longhorns coach Mack Brown pointed out, "Pro teams are in cities."

	“	I remember writing in a journal, 'I want to give up. I want to quit.'I was breaking down, crying. ”
		— Wisconsin WR Lee Evans

Still, Evans ended up with more maturity than he wished for. That's what happens when your dreams shatter and you have to put them back together, one shard at a time. All the honors in college football won't help you when you're alone on your couch, needing ice for your surgically repaired knee, and only you and your crutches can get it.

Evans got the ice. He persevered. Evans crammed a year's worth of rehab into six months. He intended to return to the field in October for the Big Ten portion of the Badgers' schedule. The doctors and the trainers told him to be patient. They didn't understand.

"Redshirt," Evans said, "wasn't even in the picture."

But every time that Evans tried to take his knee to game speed last fall, it puffed up. On Monday, coaches would speak optimistically that this would be the week that Evans played. On Tuesday, when his left knee looked like a pan of Jiffy Pop, they knew this would not be the week. Evans' goal of returning to play in 2002, pushed back more often than a fourth-team lineman, was finally cancelled. Redshirt was in the picture, all right. It was Evans who dissolved out of focus.

On the day before the Badgers' final regular-season game, Evans underwent surgery again. Though his doctors believed this surgery had solved the swelling, the thought of another round of ice packs, and crutches, and limping, and hoping, and doubting, became too much for Evans.

"I remember saying, 'You can just quit,'" Evans said Wednesday. "Pursue something where your knee is not a factor in what you do."

He sat on a couch outside the Badgers locker room, a few steps from where the All-American plaque with his picture hung on the wall.

"I remember writing in a journal, 'I want to give up. I want to quit.'" Evans' voice, the voice that springs to life in greeting strangers, grew soft. "I was breaking down, crying."

Evans can talk about it now. The second surgery fixed what the first one didn't. Two months after the surgery, when he returned to school in January after winter break, he played basketball with his friends. The next morning, his knee was sore, but it looked like a knee, not a grapefruit. No major swelling.

"That's a good sign," he said.

He took part in a few individualized drills during spring practice. Whatever his legacy at Wisconsin becomes, part of it will be a de-emphasis on contact. Alvarez learned his lesson. "I don't think we had a scrimmage that got to 100 plays," Alvarez said. "I think we got to 75." In this year's spring game, Alvarez played his starters for one quarter, and limited that to "thud" -- hit, but don't take to the ground. "We've got to be cautious," he said, "and not just do things because that's the way we did when we played."

	Roy Williams never seriously thought about leaving Texas for the NFL.

Williams came back, he said, to leave a legacy of his own at Texas. "I want to try to leave a record here so the younger people can shoot for my records, give them something to work for," he said. There is not a trace of ego in his voice.

On Thanksgiving night, the eve of the Texas-Texas A&M game, each Texas Longhorn stands up and tells his teammates something for which he is thankful. When Williams stood up, he told his teammates, "I'm thankful for you." He also told them how much he loved Texas and that he would be back for the 2003 season. The news never left the room until Williams made it public a few weeks later. Brown sees that as a sign of the respect that Williams' teammates have for him. "One hundred thirty players stayed quiet," Brown said. "What are the odds?"

Williams believes his mother, Chris Hill, wanted him on that stage in New York on Saturday. His brother, Lloyd Hill, who led the nation in receptions as a junior at Texas Tech in 1992, wanted him to stay at Texas. Hill had a shot with the Chicago Bears, but a knee injury ended his career. He wants his little brother to stay healthy and succeed in the NFL, but first, he told Roy, "I want to win it all, too."

The talk of the best wide receivers in the nation revolves around big guys such as Williams, Reggie Williams of Washington and Rashaun Woods of Oklahoma State. Evans is an afterthought. He is 5-11, 196 pounds, with oversized hands and fingers as long as rake teeth. When Evans lies in bed now, his thoughts turn to going full speed in summer pass drills, to putting on pads again in August.

"I know I still got a ways to go," he said. Excitement crept into his voice. "It's tangible. I can see it. That's comforting to me."

When Evans decided to come back for the 2002 season, he never again thought about the NFL draft. This year, when his knee made his decision for him, he isn't so cavalier.

"It will be a little tougher to watch this draft," Evans said. "I'm going to watch it. I can't say how I'm going to feel. I think it will be weird. I can't say I won't have a thought: 'What if I was in it?'"

Ivan Maisel is a senior writer at ESPN.com. He can be reached at ivan.maisel@espn3.com.