The arm has seen him through a lot of ballgames. It once propelled him to a spot on the USA Junior National team with current New York Yankees prospect Drew Henson at third and Felipe Lopez of the Cincinnati Reds. The arm carried him to USA Today Honorable Mention All-America honors along with kids with names like Albert Pujols and Adam Dunn.

And the arm could have carried him straight to the pros after high school, except that the mind wanted a college education. So Lentz wound up at Harvard instead.

The arm also absorbed crushing checks as Lentz became one of Massachusetts’ best hockey players. The arm, along with the rest of him, took even more punishment during Lentz’s football career at St. John’s Prep—a record-breaking career alongside NFL draftee-to-be Brian St. Pierre. Lentz crashed through the line on a game-winning two-point conversion against top-ranked Xaverian one Thanksgiving Day in a game that is still the stuff of legend around these parts.

Lentz thinks about football a lot. He was recruited as a running back out of high school by Harvard’s offensive coordinator as well as being wooed by Walsh, but the coordinator was gone by the time Lentz got to Cambridge. According to Lentz, the remaining football coaches wanted him to gain 30 pounds and play middle linebacker. According to Lentz in 1998, that was a bad idea. Now, he’s not so sure.

“Walking away from football is something that I regret constantly,” Lentz says. “And I think that’s something I would’ve enjoyed doing in college and really enjoyed doing in high school. That’s up there on the regret list.”

It would be an interesting list to peruse in its entirety. Lentz had a difficult freshman year. Harvard College’s administration was on him for disciplinary issues. Harvard baseball, for its part, briefly wanted nothing to do with him. Despite all his skill, Walsh cut Lentz from the team. Lentz did not play ball his freshman season.

“He and I had a little bit of a disagreement on work habits,” Walsh says. “He did not make the team as a freshman. That started things off on a bit of a rocky foot, but he came in, a free spirit, a guy that marches to the beat of a different drummer with a lot of baseball talent.”

It would be an interesting list to read in its entirety…but Lentz can’t, or won’t, recall some of the early items.

“That’s a real long time ago,” Lentz says. “I honestly don’t remember what happened that much. I know that he was one of quite a few people around here who weren’t too happy with me. I really can’t remember that.”

Lentz missed the last of three straight Ivy League championships that season, came back and threw out a mess of would-be base stealers on two teams that narrowly missed division championships. And he was ready for a third go at it when he found out that he’d have to miss his senior season. Done for the year. Academic reasons.

“It was hard when I first found out,” Lentz says. “It got harder as I got up and went to work every day at six o’clock, wasn’t in school and wasn’t playing baseball. It wasn’t something that just came and went for a year, it was really sort of miserable.” Lentz spent the year working for Bartlett Tree Experts (“I was an arborist,” he says matter-of-factly).

“When Brian came in he was heartbroken—it hurt him,” Walsh says of Lentz’s reaction to having to leave. “It wasn’t so much the stigma of that, but he had let down some guys on the team, and he wanted to play ball.”

Even without Lentz, the team cobbled together enough wins to reach the Ivy League championship, sweeping Princeton on a sunny day in May as Lentz watched from the other side of the fence.

Walsh says that Lentz has made tremendous strides.

“There’s a lot of people that don’t bounce back when adversity faces them,” Walsh says. “He came back, and to me that says an awful lot about somebody. It could have been real easy to have gone the other way. When life throws some things in front of you that you gotta jump over. He certainly did it. So I like to look upon it that way and move on.”