TROY — It’s dark and quiet in a tiny, blue-collar town in a faraway corner of northwest Montana.

In his bedroom, upstairs in his family’s modest home, one of the most jaw-dropping athletes in the state is wide awake. He cannot and will not sleep on this night, so he stays up watching his favorite videos.

First there’s the one with the heartbreaking ending, then another that crescendos to a jubilant finish. Then there’s the old one, not quite in black-and-white, that’s showing him a whole new side of a man he’s only recently gotten to know.

On this day, Sean Opland has accepted a full-ride scholarship to Montana State University, and he won’t sleep because he can’t stop watching his soon-to-be teammates — and the former star who recruited him — play football.

“I just kept watching highlights and game film and games and I was like, ‘this is where I get to play’,” Opland said of that night. “I get to play with this team.”

If Opland, a once-in-a-generation talent in Troy, sounds in awe of the opportunity in front of him, it’s not because he’s intimidated. It’s because, sometimes, he doesn’t appreciate — or doesn’t want to dwell on — his own exceptional abilities.

“It’s hard to explain him,” Troy coach Brendan Miller said. “He’s so different. He’s not your prototypical super-jock.

“It’s almost like the shy kid is all of a sudden a super-stud in football.”

Case in point: Opland’s teammates had to find out from either their coach or the newspaper that he had been offered and accepted the Bobcats’ scholarship.

Was Miller surprised Opland kept this news, the biggest of his life to this point, a secret?

“No, not really,” he said with a laugh.

“He’s always worried about coming across too boastful and being too cocky.

“He’s worried that if he goes around saying ‘yeah, I verballed to D-I, full ride scholarship’ people would start thinking ‘oh, you’re going to rub it in our face.’

“He thinks about that kind of stuff, about not wanting to make his teammates feel bad about any situation. He just wasn’t going to say a word to anybody.

“It seems crazy to me,” Miller added. ”I’d be jumping up and down.”

The dichotomy of Opland’s lives — a spectacular one on the field and a nondescript one off of it — is owed in part to his upbringing. The younger of two siblings, Opland has spent his entire life in Troy (population 938) and was raised by parents whose own dogged determination rubbed off on their only son.

“(His parents) haven’t let any of this go to his head,” Miller said.

“They’re hard-working people and they’ve done a great job. They harp on him about school more than sports, making sure he keeps his grades up. They’ve done a great job.

“I’ve never even known (Opland) to get detention,” he continued.

“He spends his summers working, he doesn’t party, he doesn’t drink. If I had 20 kids with his ‘problems’ then I wouldn’t have any problems as a coach.”

When it comes time to hit the football field, though, the mild-mannered senior channels Clark Kent — stepping into a phone booth and emerging as a single-minded, fiercely determined football behemoth.

“You hear people say they like to go fishing or hunting or just go out for walks to just to get away, to get their minds off things,” Opland said.

“(Football)’s my thing.

“When I’m on the field with those 10 other guys, when I’m on offense, my objective is to get the ball in the end zone whether it’s going to be me or my team. Everything else goes away.”

“I remember my freshman year they were yelling my name and yelling my name constantly trying to get my attention, trying to tell me something,” Opland continued. “And I was so focused in on the game I never heard them.

“That’s about when I knew this is the sport that I want to play. This is where I’m going to focus my efforts.”

Opland played soccer growing up and enjoyed his adolescent growth spurt early, towering over his junior high classmates on the pitch.

When he was told he was getting a little too aggressive for soccer, the 5-foot-11, 200-pound speedster made the move to a more appropriate venue for his combination of quickness and power.

A starter at linebacker since his freshman year, Opland’s football gifts truly shine on the offensive side of the ball.

Because of a void on the Trojans’ roster, he’s playing quarterback this season but likely projects as a running back at the next level.

“He’s good on defense but he’s special on offense,” Miller said.

“When Sean’s on defense, he hits people and he makes athletic plays all the time. But when he’s on offense and he’s running the ball and somebody comes to hit him? He blows them up. He accelerates through them.”

Through seven games this fall, Opland has run for 1,412 yards at an average clip of more than nine yards per carry. He’s thrown for another 434 yards, has piled up more than 70 percent of Troy’s offense and has accounted for 20 of the team’s 23 offensive touchdowns.

Still, to no surprise, Opland’s contributions don’t end on game day.

“He’s the hardest working kid in the weight room, hardest working kid in practice, always the first done in every wind sprint. In every drill he’s working the hardest,” Miller said.

“It’s seriously a coach’s dream. You get these small towns, and a kid that’s naturally gifted like that, a lot of times they’ll slack because they can dominate without having to work hard.”

For the small-town boy, Opland’s next stage will be a much larger one. He’s not going to be the only naturally-gifted kid, he’s not going to be the only one living football day and night, and he’s not going to be the only star in town.

“It’s always a big shock when you get into college football because everybody is bigger and stronger than you, and most high school kids aren’t used to that,” Miller said.

“But the fact that he works so hard on his own, and he’ll have coaches and teammates that are willing to push him and make him better, I think he’ll be an excellent college football player.”

Opland, who watched with admiration his future teammates and the coach that recruited him — former defensive back Michael Rider — on that sleepless night just a few months earlier, plans to tackle the challenge of college football with his typical zest and without intimidation.

But while he isn’t worried about playing in Bozeman, he is worried about the roads.

“It’s always been landmarks for me,” Opland said of his typical navigation technique. “Go to the museum, or go to Lake Creek, or Iron Creek or out to Kootenai Vista or something like that. I don’t remember roads very well so that’s something I’ll have to figure out.”

If he studies a map half as hard as everything else, expect to see Sean Opland leading tours of downtown Bozeman in no time at all.