Aireontae Ersery took a drive down southern Kansas City neighborhood streets on a recent afternoon. The nondescript houses and apartments, past due for renovation, offered the setting he specifically sought and then made a point to take in along the way. The memories they sparked, he’s always craved them — but that’s been particularly true lately.

On Thursday or Friday night, the NFL’s commissioner will stand in front of a national TV audience and read Ersery’s name as an NFL Draft pick. Here’s to hoping that commissioner, Roger Goodell, sticks the landing. (It’s air-ee-ON-tay ER-ser-ee, by the way.) The 6-foot-6, 330-pound presence is a projected first- or second-round left tackle and will soon be asked to protect the blindside of an NFL quarterback. Who knows? Maybe that quarterback will be Patrick Mahomes in Kansas City.

The NFL destination will be revealed this week. On this drive, the destination is simply home. Or homes, rather, past and present. He and four siblings, under the care of a single mother, bounced around from place to place as kids, a never-ending cycle between beds or couches offered by family members and their own tight quarters somewhere in Kansas City. Until, at one point, they had no place to go at all.

“I’ve been through some (crap), man,” Ersery says. “But I take great pride in it.” He hasn’t forgotten. He’s insistent on that. Ersery graduated Ruskin High School in KC before playing college football at the University of Minnesota. He screamed so loudly when Minnesota called that his mom rushed into the room, fearful something had gone wrong. She hadn’t heard him yell like that before.

When he returns home — and he’s here now, preparing for a draft watch party — he occasionally embarks on these methodical, meditative drives, with a specific intent.

To relive the childhood he once hid. And the ambition it always sparked. “I like to stop by the old houses. It might be painted up, but the house, the structure of it, hasn’t changed,” he says. “The color might change, but the inside probably never changed.” He spoke literally. The metaphor works better.

‘Any way you can’ Aireontae Ersery wanted to be a basketball star before he arrived at Ruskin High. Figured he might play in the NBA some day. Football came by accident. By a chance encounter. Ersery had family members who participated in football workouts after the high school day concluded, and one afternoon as a freshman, Ersery found himself in the weight room waiting for a ride home. Ruskin football coach William Perkins had a rule about that sort of thing. “I know you’re not sitting down in my weight room,” he told Ersery.

Before he turned back to resume leading the football workout, Perkins followed with a question. “Why aren’t you playing football?” Perkins saw the size, even if Ersery’s body then was more than 100 pounds lighter than his current 330-pound frame. But Perkins knew next to nothing about the athlete.

Ersery grew up with the ever-changing address of a military brat, but instead of new assignments for a parent prompting each move, he watched his mother rip eviction notices off the front door.

Takita Charles, a single mom, was 18 when she had her first son, and she named him Aireontae. For most of his life, she worked three jobs. “I fed them instead of feeding myself,” Charles says, “but it’s tough to make a way out of no way.” The skipped rent payments were the last flakes in a financial snowball. They lived without running water frequently enough that they’d developed a backup plan. A neighbor would allow the family to use the spigot attached to the perimeter of his house, so Ersery, as the eldest kid, would take a gigantic jug across the street and return with drinking water.

They’d heat some of it on the stove, one pot at a time. Their bath water. To help his mom, Ersery took on common household chores. He cut the grass, and then he’d push the mower across the street and cut his neighbors’ yards, too. “You learn to get by any way you can,” Ersery says. Until they couldn’t. After an eviction when Ersery was in middle school, they had no Plan B, no close relative or family friend who was able to take them in.

The moment his mother strove to avoid was here: They were homeless. A shelter provided a brief solution. For the ensuing two years, they survived on transitional housing, a system designed to help homeless families transition back to permanent housing. Their transition came in the form of a two-bedroom apartment, Charles in one room, the kids in another. “Everybody there is going through the same thing, so it was a judgment-free zone,” Ersery said. “Everybody’s just trying to get back on their feet.”

Charles says she worked worked at fast-food restaurants during the day, and then, after a two-hour break at home, she would head out to overnight jobs at warehouses. She returned at 7 in the morning, grabbed maybe an hour or two of sleep, and would then do it all over again.

“I was surviving off energy drinks, and anything else to get me going,” she says. “Caffeine, pills, everything.” Her eldest son thrived on something else: motivation to get out. An NFL ending? There are NFL scouts who rave about Ersery’s footwork for a man his size. His balance, too. They call him an easy-mover, and depending on the scout, a future NFL starter. His mother calls him a Mama’s Boy. In neighborhoods, she says, where it might have been easy to find trouble, he provided none. A “Heaven-sent” first-born. Always been that way. The future NFL starter? That’s new. Charles couldn’t afford many organized sports leagues, but Ersery never had much difficulty finding a hoop. It became an outlet, sure, but more than anything, it made room for the dream. Perkins, the Ruskin High coach, provided another. Ersery immediately agreed to football after their accidental meeting in the weight room, but Perkins had heard those stories before. He checked in frequently, until Ersery told him he meant his word — Perkins didn’t need to keep asking.

At the end of offseason workouts, the head coach handed out T-shirts to those with perfect attendance. To this day, Ersery will argue Perkins unfairly docked him a day. He should’ve had 100%. He loved it. By the end of his first season at Ruskin — his first ever season of football, that is — Ersery played just about every snap. He was at left tackle, defensive line, even long-snapper. He’d come off the field during kickoff returns, but “that was just to get a breather,” he quipped.

The colleges started calling about two positions — left tackle and defensive tackle — but Minnesota knew its plan. Ersery thrived as a blindside protector, and in December, his fifth year at Minnesota, he was named Big Ten Offensive Lineman of the Year — in a conference known for its big bodies up front.

His draft stock has fluctuated for a year now, but Ersery is expected to go somewhere between the late first round and middle of the second. In his mock draft this week, Cris Collinsworth projected Ersery would be taken No. 31 overall in the first round. By Kansas City.

The Chiefs have indeed reached out to Ersery. In need of a long-term left tackle, they used one of their 45 NFL Scouting Combine interviews to chat with him there, in Indianapolis. They asked him what he thought of playing near home. And how about protecting for three-time Super Bowl winner Patrick Mahomes?

Ersery didn’t need to hop in his car for a drive to appreciate that contrast. In his three years at Ruskin, the team won three games. Total. He had opportunities to leave, to find a more successful high school program. Could you have really blamed him? But he’d learned something over the previous few years, without a permanent home, even if he didn’t feel like sharing it at the time. “I don’t run from (crap),” he says. “I’m willing to put in the work.” There it is. That metaphor we promised. He’ll watch the draft from his mother’s living room in Kansas City. What better place to soak it all in? The circumstances have changed drastically since the kid from Kansas City lugged a water jug across the street. He’s on the verge of securing a contract that will literally pay him millions.