The story has been told hundreds of times.

No, seriously. Hundreds of times.

Everyone in Ripon, Wis., population 7,241, has heard it at least once. A good part of the town boasts of having witnessed it in person. The rest picked it up after it started circulating on the local police radio.

Dan Konecny, himself, has retold the story to perfection. But while the Northwestern freshman pitcher speaks about it now with distance and little emotion, it’s still not his favorite small-talk topic.

Taking the mound during a July 6 American Legion game last summer, the 6-foot-5 Konecny carried with him the invincibility of the community’s three-sport high school star.

But in the fleeting span of a fraction of a second, Konecny’s promising future as a Big Ten pitcher was nearly scrapped.

The righthander hurled the first pitch of the third inning and then watched as the batter lined it right back at him. Unable to regroup from his motion fast enough, Konecny felt the ball smash into his face. He then crumpled to the field and blacked out.

“When he’s up on the mound, he’s a big guy and he just looks so formidable,” said Debbi Konecny, Dan’s mother, who was in the stands that day along with numerous extended family members and friends. “And then to see his feet come out from under him, the hat fly, and to hear the sound of the ball hitting him and his kind of guttural reaction – a lot of those senses you can still kind of hear and see.”

The stands collectively gasped and the park went silent. Then Konecny’s teammates started wandering around the field in a daze.

An intolerable 45 minutes later, Konecny’s teammates resumed the game without him. As they stumbled to a 4-3 loss, their star pitcher was shuttled off to the emergency room for a two-day medical saga that ended with a six-and-a-half hour operation and the total restructuring of the right side of his face.

Throughout the whole nightmare, as Tom Konecny watched his son collapse and as doctors reinforced the family’s worst speculations, he recalls with the most despair the ambulance ride – when the star pitcher wondered through tears, “What if I can never get back on the mound again?”

Konecny’s face healed, and his eyesight wasn’t damaged as everyone had feared. Today, after sustaining a tripod fracture in his cheek, damage to the lower orbital of his eye, crushed sinuses and a broken jaw, his only battle wound is a small scar above his right eyebrow.

He lost 20 pounds in the two weeks after the accident, but eventually regained the weight. Konecny says he doesn’t feel a thing now, although he has several metal plates in his cheek.

“I had asked the doctor if he was going to set alarms off,” Debbi Konecny recalled. “And he said, ‘Gosh, I’ve never quite put this kind of metal in. I’m not sure if he will or not.’ I didn’t know if we had the bionic man.”

As the possibility of being physically unable to pitch dissipated, another hurdle arose when Konecny arrived at NU in the fall.

In Konecny’s second intrasquad outing, infielder Matt Thompson drilled a line shot up the middle. It didn’t even graze Konecny, but it triggered psychological problems that took longer to heal than his face.

He started nibbling at the corners, afraid to throw a ball anywhere near the plate. And he instinctively ducked every time he heard the crack of a bat against the ball. That reaction kept him off the mound all fall and convinced NU baseball coach Paul Stevens to send him to a sports psychologist.

Even his teammates offered their help.

“(I told him) as long as you play, you’re never going to see that happen again, not even to anyone that you play against or play with,” said junior pitcher Gabe Ribas, who has mentored Konecny during his recovery.

While Ribas advised and the psychologist analyzed, Stevens implemented some unconventional drills in Konecny’s winter practices.

Konecny hung out in the batting cages, getting used to the sound of the ball off the bat. Then he started pitching to hitters who would intentionally miss. Stevens also had him stand behind other pitchers as they threw to batters.

“I couldn’t spend the rest of my opportunity to play baseball being afraid to (pitch) again,” Konecny said. “I never thought I wouldn’t be able to do it again. I was just wondering how long it would take.”

Konecny pitched to a live batter for the first time only two weeks before the Wildcats started their preseason schedule in February. Then Stevens spared him no mercy in his first outing against a live opponent.

Konecny came into a game against Illinois-Chicago facing a bases-loaded, no-out situation. Although he walked the first batter, Konecny escaped the jam with a double play and went on to take the win.

“He went from the refrigerator right into the frying pan and just did a tremendous job,” Stevens said. “At that point I knew that no matter whatever else happened the rest of the year, he was going to be able to handle anything that came his way.”

Konecny scraped off the rust in several rough outings at the beginning of the regular season. But he has settled down the last several weeks, often appearing in games as the Cats’ closer.

For the year, Konecny is 2-2 and tied for second in the Big Ten with eight appearances heading into Penn State this weekend.

Nearly a year later, Konecny says the injury and its psychological effects aren’t a factor at all, putting him in good position to claim a starting role as a sophomore.

“You’ll never be the same after an accident like that,” Tom Konecny said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s not fully recovered.”

And Dan Konecny says he actually learned a few things from the experience.

“It makes me not want to leave a good pitch over the plate,” he said.