LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Matt Grosserode loved football.

When he was 5 year old, he wore a Chicago Bears uniform he got for Christmas. He wouldn’t take it off, not even at dinner.

When he broke his arm playing youth football, he kept coming to practice, soaking it all in from the sidelines.

He always had talent, but he had more than that. He had desire.

“He worked on it all the time, from the time he was little,” his father, John, said, “because that’s what he wanted to be.”

Matt starred on two state championship teams at Lincoln Pius X. Then he went to play with the big boys.

“He had a fire burning inside him all the time,” said his Iowa State coach, Dan McCarney.

McCarney called the 6-foot, 225-pound fullback the social director because he loved his teammates so much.

Matt gave up football after three seasons. He’d had two injuries and it was time to concentrate on his studies and the rest of his life, he told his parents.

When he went back to Ames to tell McCarney, tears welled up in his eyes.

“Hey, Matt,” McCarney said. “It’s OK. You’ve got to do what’s good for you.”

A few months later, on Aug. 6, 2003, Matt was killed in a car wreck in Ames.

A short while after Matt died, a box was on the family’s porch.

It was the night of his younger brother Danny’s first game with the Pius freshman team.

The whole family would be there, their first outing except for church since Matt died.

When she opened the box, tears fell.

She picked up the football helmet nestled inside.

She held it to her face. She smelled him. She smelled the little boy who walked in the house all those autumn afternoons happy and tired and sweaty. She smelled the young man she waited for outside Jack Trice Stadium.

Mark Conrad, 13, is a Cyclone fan from Hartland, Wis. He got a helmet in 2002 when ISU sold some equipment.

He became a fan of Matt’s after he read the name on the chinstrap.

When Conrad heard about Matt’s death, he told his mother he could not keep the helmet.

Joann said she believes the helmet was a message from Matt.

“He was letting us know he’s still in this family,” she said. “It was a gift from heaven and Mark was the messenger.”