Penn State football can be the stuff of dreams.

Sometimes the dreams are modest ones.

For Ryan Curran, it's not about touchdowns or quarterback sacks or NFL apprenticeships or even playing in a game in plain blue and white.

"I'd be thrilled just to bust by butt in practice every day," Curran said recently.

Curran, a Solanco graduate, was one of a few dozen Penn State students who showed up for a cattle-call tryout for the football team in January.

These weren't "preferred," or "invited," walk-ons. These were guys who answered an ad, came to a meeting, took a physical and showed up at Holuba Hall (the football team's indoor practice facility).

It happens once in the fall semester and once in the spring. It's a nod — a barely perceptible one — to the notion that big-time college football is an extracurricular activity available (theoretically) to the entire student body.

Joe Paterno wasn't there, of course. None of the full-time assistant coaches were even involved in the tryout, just grad assistants and football-administator types. It consisted of being timed in the 40-yard dash and 10-yard shuttle run and then participating in position-specific drills.

That was it.

"I felt like you barely got a shot to show what you could do," Curran said.

Which may be why nobody from the tryouts actually got invited to join the team, this spring or last fall.

It has happened. Penn Manor grad Dave Jens was on the Lions' roster for three seasons after making the team as an uninvited walk-on in the winter of 1999.

Kyle Johnson, now a junior safety, made the team via a cattle-call tryout in the winter of 2008.

Soon after, he received a Facebook message from Curran.

"I just said, 'Hey, I heard you walked on the team, and that's always been my dream,' " Curran recalled. "And I asked him for some tips on what I should be doing to get better."

"To this day, I have no idea how Ryan found me. Man, that kid is resourceful," Johnson told the Daily Collegian, Penn State's student paper.

"But it also shows how he is persistent and how much he wants this."

Indeed, Curran wants it bad.

He was, in his own words, "an average high school player" at Solanco, where he graduated in 2007. Not only that, but he missed his entire senior season with a torn back muscle.

Needless to say, the 5-foot-11, 175-pound linebacker was not highly recruited. Or recruited, period.

So Curran enrolled at Penn State's York campus, and played some football for the semipro York Silver Bullets.

After two years at Penn State-York, Curran changed his major from business to kinesiology and transferred to Penn State's main University Park campus, where he could touch his dream and see it and get next to it.

That was all the inspiration he needed to get serious. He became a workout fanatic, putting in around 20 hours of training a week. He started hanging out and working out with current Penn State players such as Johnson and defensive lineman Mikel Berry.

He became enough of a fixutre at Holuba that he could sneak in to the facility after hours, or work out there while other Penn State teams were practicing there.

"They probably thought I was on the team already," he said.

When he's home, Curran works out out at Power Train Sports Institute in Lancaster. He will intern there this summer.

Power Train is also where trainer Steve Saunders works with Penn State and other college players preparing for the NFL draft each winter.

Curran ran into Sean Lee, Penn State's graduating star linebacker, there over the holiday break.

"He was such an inspiration," Curran said. "He told me, 'Keep working hard. I know you'll get it.' After that, I was just like, wow, I can do this."

Maybe. Maybe not. Curran was up to 210 pounds for the tryout last month. He felt ready, and the spring-semester tryout is a bit more promising than the one in the fall, when the roster is more set.

Curran felt he did as well as could be expected in the tryout but, "Unfortunately, I didn't get a positive outcome."

He'll be at Penn State through the 2012 football season, though, because of the change in majors. He could have three or four more shots at it.

"I'll probably try it again,' he said.

Why?

"To be able to run out of that tunnel with the team," he said.

"A lot of people would love to be able to do that, and I'll be able to say I did it for the rest of my life."