Josh Heupel tries to think of a moment when he's been hopelessly lost. You can't go down as many back roads as he has without at least one old-fashioned, call-mama-and-buy-a-bus-ticket-home meltdown. He's found himself in the middle of Utah, surrounded by turkey farms. He's sat on a creaky bus to the Mexican border for 15 hours with a bad breakfast from Vegas swimming in his stomach. He played high school football in a town so cold, they kept hay bales on the sidelines for insulation and pitched pup tents in the stands. Journeyman football can take you to a lot of cold, barren corners, and "Hype" -- teammates gave him the nickname; it sounds like the first syllable of Heupel -- has seen his share. And yet he insists that he can't think of a moment when he was lost. "Nope," he says. "There's always been a plan."

Feel free to be skeptical. After all, now's the time, with Heisman talk cranking up to fever pitch, for a little legend building. Why not insist that you always knew Ephraim, Utah, would lead to a place like Norman, Okla.? Why not make it seem like you've always had it wired, whether you did or not? Early this fall, the Sooners were a 4-0 team everyone figured would be 4-3 after facing 10th-ranked Texas, fourth-ranked Kansas State and top-ranked Nebraska. But Heupel stretched and scrambled and shotgunned the Sooners past all of them, right to the top of the Bowl Championship Series rankings. So why not just say, nonchalantly, "I've always put up pretty good numbers wherever I've been"?

One line of thinking is that Heupel's simply a product of Oklahoma's West Coast-style offense, which sent out as many as five receivers and averaged 301.5 passing yards on the way to 11-0. Another holds that he's just lucky, having benefited from a Sooners interception late in the game against Texas A&M that kept the surprise of the Big 12 unbeaten. But a third theory, now gathering momentum, is that Heupel is all he's cracked up be.

The odds seemed ready to catch up to him on Nov. 18, when he looked out of sync against Texas Tech. The Red Raiders' defense blitzed him into throwing two interceptions. It wasn't until Tech tightened the score to 21-13 on its first two possessions in the fourth quarter that Heupel engineered the kind of late-game drive that has lured scouts from the Jets, Jaguars and Bears to Norman. He high-kicked and scrambled. He held firm in the pocket. And finally, on a third-and-four play that he called himself, he faked a handoff and then rolled right before mailing a 15-yard missile to his tight end at the 3. The next play, the Sooners punched it in to ice the game.

Shortly after the final whistle, head coach Bob Stoops -- a sharp-dressing 40-year-old who had his salary bumped from $675,000 to $1.4 million after the Nebraska upset -- grabbed control of the Hype machine. "I hate to be put in a position to lobby," said Stoops, before proceeding to lobby. "But I think today showed that Josh is the best quarterback out there."

Heupel's mother, a high school principal, and his father, the head coach of Division II Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., have put 67,000 miles on their 1999 Toyota watching their son play the past two seasons. And after the Sooners clinched the Big 12 South title in Norman, they led 60 friends and family into a campus restaurant called Coach's to celebrate. As Josh entered, his wool cap pulled down and the lapels of his corduroy jacket pulled up to his ears, one of those friends hollered, "Ah, ya, good game there." And instantly, everyone was murmuring "Ah, ya" in agreement.

Heupel has been on the road so long, most of his Dakota accent has been washed away. But that doesn't mean it's easy for him to fit in among Okies and Texans. Just try explaining the finer points of ice fishing, getting your car out of the garage before the door freezes or throwing a touch spiral into polar gales. "We give him a hard time," says co-captain Bubba Burcham. "We're like, 'Tell us again who else comes from South Dakota?'"

But being a coach's kid is a little like being an American abroad these days -- you're fluent in the only language that matters. At the age of 4, Heupel was watching game tape as if it were Teletubbies. When his mom took him shopping for a present to give his kindergarten teacher, he picked out a Vikings helmet. You know that smart-aleck kid at your gym, the one who needles you when you've got a dumbbell ready to crash onto your chest? That was Josh. "Hey, Feeds -- are you liftin'?" he might have said as he passed a lineman in the hall. "You better be, because my dad's only gonna be recruiting studs."

By the time his body caught up with his precocious ability to read a defense, Heupel had become a kind of curiosity in Aberdeen, a quarterback who, for the first time in anyone's memory, didn't just hand off the ball but threw it into subzero snow squalls. "I'm trying to keep stats, and I'm used to adding two, three, four yards," local radio announcer Gene Reich recently told The Oklahoman. "All of a sudden, not only were we getting first downs, we were getting 30 or 40 yards at a time."

The only NFLer to make it out of Aberdeen was a running back for the Oilers and the Eagles in the mid-'70s named George Amundson. So, arm or not, Josh considered himself fortunate to land at Weber State, a Big Sky school that lies at the base of a resort mountain in Ogden, Utah. The plan was that he'd redshirt in 1996 before taking the place of the outgoing senior the following season. The hitch was that he blew an ACL in the spring game in 1997. Determined to be ready for preseason two-a-days, he lived with his dad in a hotel near the sports medicine clinic in the Indianapolis hospital where he'd gone for rehab. They made their August deadline, but not before putting their close, positive father-son relationship to a test.

As a coach, Ken Heupel doesn't believe in coddling athletes -- even the one who bears his name. Once, during a winter vacation from school, Josh begged permission to borrow the family 4x4 so he could go over to a friend's house. Despite weather advisories that warned of 20-inch snowdrifts, Ken relented -- so long as Josh promised to be home early. He wound up staying out until midnight and, predictably, getting stuck in snow two blocks from home. Ken went out with a shovel and made his son dig a path home while he sat in the front seat with the heat on and his shirt open. "He kept pointing his finger down," says Josh. "He wanted to see pavement the whole way."

Josh threw himself into the two-a-days, hoping to win the starting spot at Weber. But he succeeded only in hurting himself again and played just four unsatisfying games as a redshirt freshman. Before he could redeem himself, a new coach, Jerry Graybeal, came in with an offense built around the running game. This is where it takes a leap of faith to believe that Josh was serene about what happened next. He gathered himself and moved to the edge of the juco world -- Snow Junior College in Ephraim, Utah. "Snow reminded me of Rocky II," he chuckles. "The weight room was the size of a compact car."

Okay, let's be fair. Snow has more going for it than the turkey farms that surround it. The passing factory that shared a national juco title back in 1985 (coincidentally, the last year Oklahoma won a national championship) boasted Fred Salanoa, the leading juco passer in the nation before Josh arrived in 1998. But Heupel had barely cracked the playbook when Salanoa, who had said he was going to switch schools, decided to stay. Josh was told the two would have to split playing time.

Over 10 first halves that season, Heupel demonstrated that the unanticipated change in venue wasn't going to alter his focus. He completed 153 of 258 passes for 2,308 yards and 28 touchdowns, with only five interceptions. "His throw was so soft, I'd scream at him to zip it," says his Snow QB coach, Joe Borich. "But his timing was so amazing that he'd get the ball there faster than the other guy with the better arm."

Snow's season also took the Dakotan down through Arizona to the Mexican border in round-trip bus rides that dragged out over 30 hours. "One school was so middle-of-nowhere," recalls Heupel, "that their mascot was a Gila monster. The whole bus ride there, we were trying to figure out what a Gila monster was. I still haven't found out."

This is where Heupel's road story takes a big, life-changing and totally unexpected turn. Some 1,200 miles from Ephraim, Bob Stoops was taking over in Oklahoma, and was looking for a starting quarterback. For Heupel, Oklahoma was never part of the plan. The road out of Ephraim was supposed to lead to Utah State, where Dave Arslanian, Heupel's Weber State coach, had landed, or maybe to the University of Utah. But by the time Heupel was ready to graduate from Snow, Utah State had already settled on Jeff Crosbie as its quarterback. And Utah?

"Yeah, yeah, I'm the guy who passed on Josh Heupel," says Utah head coach Ron McBride. "But you got to tip your hat to the guys at Oklahoma. I mean, now everyone knows him. But Ephraim, man, just isn't on the map. Know what it's known for? Sheep. Every time I go through there, I have to wait for those darn sheep to cross the highway. I'm not kidding you."

But Stoops' new offensive coordinator, Mike Leach, had been to Ephraim. And he liked what he saw on the quarterback's tapes. Oh, there were problems with Heupel, especially the way he seemed to loft his spirals while falling back on his heels, almost like he was being blown back by the wind. But Leach decided that Heupel's timing and his knack for anticipating a defensive lineman's moves by spotting telltale ticks were nothing short of remarkable. A week later, Heupel was in Norman and Leach was offering to buy him a steak dinner. Heupel politely declined, then spent the next seven hours studying game film, straining to see whether this was the offense that could deliver him from obscurity. "The secretaries all felt sorry for me," he remembers.

Their first year together in Norman, Leach knew he had to drain some of that intensity out of the kid. "He'd overanalyze everything on the sidelines," says Leach. "I had to tell him, 'Look, these guys are following you. You have to keep them loose.' " The next time he glanced at Heupel, Leach says, "Son of a gun if he didn't have this wide, overexaggerated smile. He wasn't trying to be a smart-ass. He was really just trying to smile."

This year, Josh has had more to smile about. In the off-season, his new position coach, Chuck Long (Leach had moved on to Texas Tech), drilled Heupel on his footwork, tying a bungee chord to his waist during dropbacks to help him learn to keep his balance. It's worked. The Sooners have scored fewer fourth-quarter points this season because they've gone in with bigger leads. This year's average lead going into the fourth quarter, 21.3 points, is more than a touchdown higher than the 1999 season average of 13.6.

Long, who narrowly lost the '85 Heisman to Bo Jackson when he played QB at Iowa, also made Josh gain 10 pounds of muscle by doubling up on workouts -- which proved critical in the rare game when the Sooners didn't have a blow-out fourth-quarter lead. Down 10 points against Texas A&M on Nov. 11, Heupel kept the Sooners in the game by pulling out key first downs with 19 yards rushing. The Sooners scored, then went ahead for good when linebacker Torrance Marshall intercepted that A&M pass and returned it for the clinching touchdown.

Heupel knows his form isn't classic. "I've been with five different offensive coordinators in five years and they've all tried to tinker with it," he says. Nor are his looks. His sloped nose and trim jaw seem too delicate for a quarterback, his straw-blond hair too unkempt. His shoulders droop when he walks, and that walk often seems to be in rhythm with the reggae music that he loves. When the lapels of his loose-fitting corduroy jacket are turned up, he manages to become completely anonymous.

Maybe that's what happens when you've been on the road for so long -- you learn to blend. And maybe that's why Josh's favorite place is still the dark of a film room -- one looks just the same as another. "I'm no blue-chip recruit," he says quietly. "I don't have a cannon for an arm. But after all I've been through, I think I know how to lead a football team."

A few hours after Owen Stadium field workers have cleaned up the oranges thrown by Sooners fans, Heupel is with his family in Coach's restaurant and the Florida-Florida State game is on TV. The diners cheer when Chris Weinke of FSU throws two interceptions. They groan when he helps his Heisman bid by passing for 353 yards. But Josh never looks up at the screen, even as his own stats crawl across the bottom like a stock ticker, causing the room to erupt.The Hype has traveled too long a road to buy into the hype.