The obvious place to start is with the bus story because that is where it all began for James McClean.
Or, more to the point, that is where he feared it might end.
He was 17-years-old and for the first time in his life had moved out of his comfort zone and tight-knit community, joining Institute, who in sporting terms, are to Derry what Espanyol is to Barcelona or Notts County to Nottingham.
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But for a 17-year-old dreaming of making it big, they were a pathway. To walk on this road, though, he had to step across to the other side of town and into Derry’s Waterside.
Few of McClean’s peers on the Creggan estate ever did. Yet this was the dream so this was the trek he had to make, over the Foyle bridge, into their set-up, then their first-team squad, and onto the bus for a game away to Glentoran.
He came on as a sub that day and those who were at the game remember McClean ‘playing rightly’. But those weren’t the words the 17-year-old heard in the post-match, post-mortem.
A conversation was unfolding, the participants unaware McClean was listening to it.
“How’d you think the young winger played?”
“Him? He’ll never be a player.”
The person delivering the verdict had clout within the Institute set-up to the extent McClean knew his time was already up there. He climbed back onto the bus and cried all the way home.
This evening, 17 years on, the boy who had tears in his eyes will walk out at the Aviva Stadium to become Ireland’s seventh international centurion, following on from Steve Staunton, Kevin Kilbane, Shay Given, Robbie Keane, Damien Duff and John O’Shea.
The crowd will sing his name and not just because of McClean’s fervent nationalistic beliefs but also because of what he is, the trier who never gives up, the winger who wasn’t blessed with the technical gifts that a Duff or a Keane possessed.
Here is a boy-next-door kind of story, one supporters relate to, his struggles being ours, ours being his.
How appropriate then that he got his big break came smack bang in the middle of the country’s biggest ever recession.
The year was 2008 and by now he was at Derry City, his brief, painful experience at Institute over though not forgotten.
Those harsh words would remain with McClean throughout his career and every day he sought to prove his doubter wrong. “That work ethic threatened to become a problem,” remembers Stephen Kenny, the man who signed him for Derry City, and who, tonight, will hand him his 100th cap for Ireland.
“If anything he worked too hard. I was driving home from training one night - having seen James give absolutely everything - and there he was, running the roads, doing extras. We had to explain to him that he was going to damage his knees by doing so much running on such hard surfaces.”
Around this time Raymond Carton, the chairman of McClean’s schoolboy club, Trojans, got chatting to Kenny. “I really believe in him,” the then Derry manager told Carton. “But James needs to believe in himself. I’m going to have a quiet word with him. Could you do so too?”
As it happened Carton was concerned about something else.
“James was making a name for himself with Derry City,” said the Trojans chairman, one of McClean’s earliest mentors. “Away from training, I could see him knocking about (Creggan's estate) with his mates. He was 17, 18, hanging about with what I call the blue bag boys. Those lads had blue bags filled with carry-outs (of beer). I remember thinking, ‘Christ, I hope he does not go down that road’. But he never did. James doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, never did.”
A portrait of a star was emerging, someone who was committed but also principled.
By 2009, Derry were in financial trouble and forced into administration. Sensing a bargain, Lincoln City called and offered McClean a contract. More to the point, he signed it.
When Kenny found out, he rang McClean up. “What’s the story?” he asked.
“I presumed you were leaving, Stephen,” McClean replied. “That’s why I’m here.”
Once told Kenny was staying, McClean walked back into the Lincoln manager’s office and asked their then boss, Chris Sutton, to tear up his contract, saying he wanted to return home and re-sign for Derry for a quarter of the wage. “Many people don’t know the real James,” says Kenny.
Carton does. Trojans is in his blood as his father, Edmund, founded the club in the 1930s and then, after Carton senior passed away in 1972, a teenage Raymond was approached by younger football enthusiasts in the area to restart organised football.
So, for well over half a century now, Carton and his team of coaches have been flying the flag, nurturing a dozen players who have gone on to play for Derry City, including Kevin Derry and Paul Carlyle, scorer of two of their most important goals in European football.
Yet they weren’t just football men, those Trojans. At various times during The Troubles when they doubled up as saviours.
One night, when he was training a team, a gun battle broke out across the pitch between a British Army battalion and IRA members. “We had to dive for cover,” says Raymond. “Aye, that was difficult.”
So much was in that era.
A non-political man, he used to store the team’s kits in a coal bunker at the back of his house.
One night the British Army stormed through the street, emptying the contents of every house’s coal shed. Those Trojans kits were emptied onto Raymond’s yard before coal was shovelled on top of them. “Three kits were ruined forever. You were dealing with stuff like that,” he says.
Travel was also a problem when bus companies refused to take a booking. “We had to walk to several matches, a fair distance away. It was difficult.”
Numerous matches were postponed because teams got stopped at checkpoints and never made it in time for kick off.
Yet they kept the club going because they were community as well as football men.
“People stop me in the street now and say, it is because of Trojans Football Club that they stayed out of trouble. That is what it is about, that is why we do what we do. For us it was about giving kids a sporting outlet.”
Tonight one of those kids will win his 100th cap for Ireland and the story of Trojans needs to be told to understand why their most famous graduate evolved into the person and player he became.
His environment shaped McClean, that struggle to keep going even when the odds were stacked up. "Be the best version of yourself," he was told by Carton early in his Trojans days.
Today Trojans, with its tidy clubhouse and impeccable pitch, is in a better place than it has ever been, framed shirts on its walls from ex-players. One of those is a green, Ireland shirt with No11 on it. Tonight their Trojan warrior will pull on that jersey for the 100th time.
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