The second night of the NFL draft, Adisa Isaac sat in a bar chair, his mom beside him, his high school coach behind him, all anxiously awaiting a call.

His mom, Lisa Wiltshire-Isaac, is an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago who “saw” football but never watched it. But it made her son happy, so she learned it and encouraged him.

His coach, Kyle Allen, was once a young football player with NFL dreams. Those weren’t realistic for him, so he turned toward coaching. In Isaac, he saw a player with the skill and the character to realize the dreams he couldn’t.

The two of them, now family, were brought together by one important thing: love for Isaac.

Just before the draft started, Allen pulled Isaac, a standout outside linebacker at Penn State, aside with tears in his eyes. He thanked him and his family for allowing him to experience his NFL dreams through Isaac, a sentiment Isaac found funny.

If not for Allen’s knowledge, Isaac isn’t sure if he would have known how to get to where he was, anticipating a call from an NFL general manager. If not for Allen’s kindness, he doesn’t know if his family would have followed Allen’s guidance.

Then the two brushed their tears aside to go join their families — Isaac’s mom and siblings and Allen’s wife and children — as they waited for the call.

It took longer than anticipated but, when it came, Allen saw the weight lift off the young man’s shoulders, chased by the huge grin that spread across his face. And then Isaac turned to his loved ones and scooped up his mom in an expression of joy, ready for the next step in their journey.

Open to anything

Once upon a time, Isaac wore tap shoes instead of cleats. He’d also drawn a bow across the strings of a violin and raised his voice in song with the choir.

It was all part of Wiltshire-Isaac’s plan to give him what she called a normal childhood.

“Normal” had a different meaning in their household. Many would call Isaac’s “normal” unique. His three siblings — two older brothers and a younger sister — all have different diagnoses and are classified as nonverbal. To Isaac, that was just his family, and Kyle, Y’ashua and Tadj are just his siblings.

His mother always wanted her children to have every opportunity regardless of their abilities. So she exposed them to as many opportunities as she could, and she allowed Isaac to find his passion.

So what was Isaac like as a musician?

“Very compliant,” Wiltshire-Isaac said, laughing.

That’s because he had a similar mentality to his mother’s. He was open to anything and forced nothing.

“I really just slid around and kept trying until I found the perfect fit,” Isaac said.

For a while, he thought he would go into the medical field and maybe work with kids with disabilities (both of which are still options with the degree he earned at Penn State), but it became obvious that sports were where Isaac shined. He ran track, played basketball and wrestled.

One day, some of Isaac’s middle school classmates brought their pads to school. Isaac was intrigued. Football was the one thing he hadn’t tried. He was vaguely aware of it, but he didn’t know much about the rules or the teams.

Upon hearing about her son’s interest, Wiltshire-Isaac started asking around about how to get him involved. She talked to other parents, who told her how they traveled with their kids for practice and games. With four kids at home, three of them on very different schedules than Isaac, and a job of her own, traveling wasn’t possible.

Isaac, knowing how busy his mom was, didn’t push the issue. He figured he would wait until high school to try out.

College football?

Coach Allen of Canarsie High School in Brooklyn, New York, was in the middle of one of the final practices before the first game of the season when one of his new assistant coaches brought Isaac out to meet him.

Students were long past fitness testing and tryouts. But Isaac and his mother didn’t know about those. Robert Palmer, the gym teacher and Allen’s new assistant coach, had heard from one of the school’s security guards that Wiltshire-Isaac had been asking how to get her son involved in football.

“We were literally four days away from our first varsity game,” Allen said. “Since I knew he didn’t have much experience, I just threw him on JV. Which, looking at it now, it’s kind of funny he played JV at all.”

Allen began to get to know Isaac as the kid he was at practice and at school. He didn’t ask many questions about his family, and when Isaac said he had to go take care of his siblings, he always assumed they were much younger than he was.

When Wiltshire-Isaac first brought Kyle, Y’ashua and Tadj to the field, Allen had no heads-up that they might be different in any way. Although it was quickly evident, Allen was unfazed and unbothered.

“I didn’t approach them with soft gloves,” Allen said. “I just started talking to them regular, and I think that made his mother more comfortable.”

His instinct was correct. Isaac described his mother as protective of her children and how people react to them. Allen’s reaction, or lack thereof, helped build trust faster than normal, Isaac said. As a result, she allowed Isaac to go places as long as Allen was there.

But one day she called Allen to check on Isaac. Allen thought Isaac was with her. Because he wasn’t, they learned Isaac had evidently skipped practice.

When Allen saw Isaac next, he lit into him, telling him this was his ticket to a better life for him and his family, that football was what would help him hand his mother the keys to a house one day.

Isaac calmly weathered the storm. Then he never missed another practice. Little did Allen know, Isaac had no clue what he was talking about. It wasn’t until a few years later that Isaac told him he didn’t know what college football was at the time.

‘Enjoying the moment’

As Allen worked Isaac out in front of college scouts early one morning before school, he saw Wiltshire-Isaac peeking in. With a finger to her lips, she indicated not to alert Isaac to her presence.

“It was the cutest thing,” Allen said. “She was so excited to watch this happen and to learn more about it.”

Those early-morning visits became common, and they stayed under the radar. Isaac, absorbed in his task, did not notice his mom among those watching.

Wiltshire-Isaac chuckled when she thought back to those mornings.

”To see him just work out and just to see the process of what he’s doing and how he’s doing it, I was just enjoying the moment because you never get those moments again,” Wiltshire-Isaac said.

Isaac, who was sliding around looking for the perfect fit, found it in football.

Palmer recalled a high school football jamboree where Adisa went up against an offensive lineman with a Division I scholarship and was “destroying him left and right.” That was when the coaching staff truly started to understand what they had on their hands.

Because Wiltshire-Isaac trusted Allen, she allowed him and his coaches to start taking Isaac on college visits. Those visits solidified what the Canarsie coaches thought — defensive coordinator Chris Sino said hearing Division I coaches talk about how special he was showed them Isaac was great outside the context of their team and their league.

The first college trip was to Rutgers, and Allen recalled Isaac was confused by the school. Isaac added he didn’t really even know what Rutgers was. But his lack of knowledge didn’t keep Rutgers from giving him his first scholarship offer.

Isaac didn’t grasp that, either.

“At first, I didn’t really understand the ins and outs and the offer,” Adisa said. “Like, how did it work? Did I have to sign right now? What’s going on? But I knew that I had an opportunity on the table as far as being able to go to college for free and being able to play football.”

One day, a family friend of Palmer’s who worked at Fordham University came to visit. After watching him, he knew Isaac was too good a player for the school. He had previously served as a graduate assistant for Penn State, so he made some calls.

His instinct was right. Penn State turned out to be the right fit for Isaac with its mix of football, school, environment and distance. It was close enough that his siblings could watch games but far enough that he would learn to stand on his own — especially away from the influences of the community where he grew up, another assistant coach, Dominic Fievre, said.

Football had helped Isaac come out of his shell — Wiltshire-Isaac said she saw him start to express himself more verbally and grow in confidence and self-esteem — but away from home, he learned what it meant to be Adisa, which is all his mother wanted.

“That’s the whole thing — for him to do his own thing,” Wiltshire-Isaac said. “I never wanted him to feel like he’s doing it for us. That’s one of my big things. You’re doing it for you, and we’re here to support you. We’re here to enjoy the moment with you.”

‘Can’t mess with her house’

After signing a four-year, $5,648,034 rookie contract with the Ravens, Isaac has the means to buy his mother a new house.

There’s one problem — she doesn’t want one.

“I can’t mess with her house,” Isaac said, laughing.

She and Allen’s biggest request was a box of Ravens jerseys with the No. 50 on them and “Isaac” across the back.

“My daughter’s principal, because everybody — EVERYBODY— is in it with him, she’s like, ‘Did the jersey come out yet? Let me go and see. Let me go and see. I’m going to order. Everybody’s going to order!” Wiltshire-Isaac said before the season.

They’re very different than Penn State’s simple blue-and-white jerseys with no names on them. Wiltshire-Isaac joked she would have to cover up the portrait of Isaac in his Penn State uniform and start putting black and purple around the house to help his siblings transition their fandom to Baltimore.

Baltimore was the best place for Isaac for many reasons. His oldest brother is afraid of flying. Wiltshire-Isaac’s first reaction to hearing Baltimore was “OK, good, we can still come to the games,” she said.

Baltimore was also where Isaac’s friend and mentor, outside linebacker Odafe Oweh, played. And, based on what Isaac had seen and what Oweh had experienced, Baltimore’s defense fit Adisa’s preferred style of play.

Allen and Isaac said it’s funny because they weren’t even considering he could go to the Ravens. They thought they might hear from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers at 92 or the Philadelphia Eagles at 94, so they were confused when his phone rang at the 93rd pick.

“I’m like, ‘Baltimore? Wait a minute. He’s on the phone with the Ravens?’” Allen said. “Sometimes things happen for a reason. You fall down in the draft and end up at the No. 1 defense in the league? That is a blessing.”

But just like the night of the draft, Isaac’s patience was tested when he finally got his shot. He suited up for rookie camp before aggravating his hamstring, an injury he’d been dealing with since the NFL combine.

Isaac missed all of organized team activities and minicamp, along with two weeks of training camp.

He finally returned to practice Aug. 6 and made his preseason debut Aug. 17 against the Atlanta Falcons. It was clear he was out of shape from his long absence, coach John Harbaugh said, but he still impressed.

“He was a factor, rushing the passer, in the run game,” Harbaugh said. “He’s a big guy. He’s explosive. He’s not as far along … as far as the conditioning part of it — because he had the hamstring, so he’s going to be sore tomorrow, I’m quite sure. … So I do worry about that a little bit with him, but I am happy about the way he played. He sure looked good. He’s kind of got a start there.”

After his setback, Adisa has a fight ahead to work himself into a significant role. The Ravens made him inactive for nine games, and when he does play, it’s mostly on special teams. But the Ravens see potential in him.

Regardless, he has a bunch of family ready to make the trip from New York to Baltimore— or from New York City to East Rutherford, NJ, where the Ravens will take on the New York Giants on Sunday.

Allen, an avid 49ers fan, has assured Isaac he’s pulling for the Ravens and will root for them even if they play the 49ers.

“He saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself,” Isaac said. “When you have somebody like that in your corner, it makes life a lot easier.”

And Wiltshire-Isaac, who didn’t know anything about football, can now proudly explain the game to her co-workers, throwing out words such as “edge” and “sack” and “tackles for loss.”

“She’s everything,” Isaac said. “Without her, this doesn’t work. This doesn’t go. I’m not here.”