All spring, Luke Arciniega was preparing for a season that could have never come.

He attacked a switch to defensive end with abandon, marrying himself to his playbook while reshaping a decade of linebacker training. He added muscle in the weight room. Then more muscle. A bag of protein sat next to his bed in his University Village apartment. Another in the kitchen. Everything geared toward a football career that may have finally slipped through his fingers.

Injuries had run Arciniega’s eligibility dry and there was a chance he’d played his last college game against Louisville on Oct. 3, 2014. Then he was in Syracuse’s athletic compliance office one afternoon last March and a staff member congratulated him.

“Wait, did I just ruin it?” they asked.

“I don’t know, what did you ruin?” Arciniega answered.

Soon Arciniega learned that, after months of hoping and waiting, he’d been granted two additional years of eligibility from the NCAA. He immediately called his parents, sister and girlfriend. When he got back to his apartment he joked to his roommate, former SU linebacker Josh Kirkland, that he’d be at Syracuse long enough to get a Ph.D.

“No way,” Kirkland said to him. “You were only expecting to get one year back.”

If football has taught Arciniega anything, it’s to steer clear of firm expectations. His Division I career was supposed to start in 2010 at the University of Nevada, a 20-minute drive from his hometown of Spanish Springs, but he was medically disqualified for head injuries after sustaining a concussion in the first week of training camp. What followed was a jagged path to Syracuse, including three semesters away from football, a year at Sierra (California) College and a series of injuries that have hampered him in two seasons with the Orange.

Now he’s found stability as a 23-year-old junior defensive end, and one of SU’s four captains, five years after graduating high school with two years left to play.

Joe Imelli was sitting at his desk in the physical education office at Shaw (Nevada) Middle School when a scrawny seventh grader with flowing hair walked in. The kid introduced himself as Luke Arciniega and Imelli shook his extended hand. Imelli could see the physical outline of a football player but it was only a blank canvas, untouched by weights or Arciniega’s eventual growth spurt.

In the next six years, the scrawny seventh grader grew into the centerpiece of an impenetrable defense. He drew college interest by his junior season and Spanish Springs shifted Arciniega to middle linebacker before his senior year. The Nevada coaches regularly made the short drive to see him play. When they offered a scholarship, Arciniega jumped to play for the team he grew up watching.

He was around 210 pounds after joining Nevada’s Class of 2010, and they told him they wanted him to be between 240 and 250 when he got to campus. Arciniega went to his mom Nancy’s pizza shop, Manny & Olga’s, every day for lunch and stomached pizza, wings and fries. The customers who came in and out told him they were excited to see him play for the hometown team.

But then came an unforgettable hit during a forgettable training camp play. A “misunderstanding” with the Nevada coaches about Arciniega’s concussion and concussion history led him to leave the team and sport all at once.

“One thing I do know is that they made a mistake,” said Lawrence Quadrio, who was Arciniega’s defensive coordinator at Spanish Springs. “However it went down, I have no problem saying it on the record that Nevada made a mistake.”

To keep his scholarship, Arciniega took an internship with the Nevada athletic department. With Arciniega standing on the sidelines, not in pads or a uniform, now-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick led the Wolf Pack to a 13-1 record including a Western Athletic Conference championship, a win over Boston College in the Fight Hunger Bowl and a No. 11 national ranking at season’s end.

Jeremiah Green, then a sophomore linebacker and Arciniega’s roommate, would come home from practice most nights to find Arciniega laying on his dorm-room bed lamenting his situation.

“I just want to play, that’s it,” Arciniega said to Green one night.

“Well right now you can’t,” Green recalls telling him. “You just need to focus on how you can get better, and you can’t let one person tell you that you can’t play.”

In time, Arciniega listened. He added close to 40 pounds of muscle in the weight room, sought a second medical opinion and moved an hour west to Rocklin, California after he was cleared.

He revived his career in a stadium that held just 1,500 fans, where his play with the Sierra Wolverines drew interest from a handful of power-five programs. After one junior college season, he committed to play linebacker for Syracuse.

“I think that once it wasn’t there for him he felt something,” Brice Anderson, Arciniega’s high school linebackers coach, said. “I think he really realized how much he missed it. And he was so excited to get the opportunity at Syracuse.”

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Arciniega collected 18 total tackles while playing in all of SU’s 13 games in 2013. But hip problems, that had lingered since the start of his football career, became debilitating and he had one of his hips replaced days after Syracuse beat Minnesota in the Texas Bowl.

With a replacement for his other hip scheduled a month and a half after the first, Arciniega again found himself at the intersection of love and frustration. He got lunch with Quadrio, like he always did, at Bully’s Sports Bar and Grill in Spanish Springs. Sitting across from Quadrio was the linebacker who once blitzed on a screen pass and chased a speedy running back for 60 yards before tackling him at the doorstep of the end zone. It was one of the best defensive players he’d ever coached. It was still Luke Arciniega, even if there was heavy doubt in his eyes.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to finish this off like I wanted to,” Quadrio remembers Arciniega saying to him.

Instead, Arciniega underwent the second replacement and readied himself for the next year. Then he suffered a foot injury against Maryland, three weeks into the season. A quick rehab had him back two games later against Louisville in the Carrier Dome, but he re-injured his foot and sat out the Orange’s final seven games to avoid surgery.

While Arciniega made yet another comeback, his future was completely out of his hands. Quadrio had always urged Arciniega to apply for an additional year of eligibility for his lost freshman season at Nevada, and missing most of 2014 pushed him to do so.

When the NCAA surprised Arciniega by giving him two years — for his first year at Nevada and his most recent season with SU — he was knee deep in his transition to defensive end. During training camp, SU defensive line coach Tim Daoust monitored his progress daily and said he’s ready to stop the run and close to being a viable pass rusher for a defensive line that graduated three starters after last season.

Syracuse’s other defensive linemen, all younger than Arciniega, call the 23-year-old “Grandpa” and “Dad” to remind him of his winding road to now. Coincidentally, he and his girlfriend Rachel found out on Aug. 5 that she’s pregnant with a boy and is due in January.

“I hope he can look back at my film,” Arciniega said. “And whatever he wants to do, whether it’s sports or not, I hope he’ll be able to take something from it.”

One day, Arciniega’s son will hear stories about his father. He’ll hear about the fear he inspired in opponents at Spanish Springs. He’ll hear about what happened at Nevada. The year and a half away from football. The resurgence. The injuries. The rehabs. The switch to defensive end and whatever happens next.

And then he’ll know that his dad never gave up.