Quite fitting that Dalton Risner’s dad happened to be in a car driving from a family reunion in Colorado back home to Oklahoma as he watched the news conference reuniting his son with the Bengals team he considers a family.

A little bit more comfortable than that ride they took trying to find Dalton a scholarship out here on the plains.

One of the best times of Mitch Risner's life is that 2,000-mile buddy movie of a summer trip they took while Dalton played for him at Wiggins High School, and, as Mitch remembers it, he and his son could have picked up that cubicle of a rented Toyota Yaris and moved it themselves through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma.

"I didn't want to drive my car that far," says Mitch, who made enough of those smart decisions to be named Coach of the Year twice in scholastic Colorado.

Dalton's head looked like it was in the back seat while his knees were shoved into the glove compartment. Father and son staggered the seats so their shoulders wouldn't touch. Every so often, Dalton's knee would hit the shift and screech them into neutral.

A not so funny car.

Now, finally, at age 30 and after 92 NFL starts and pocketing his biggest salary ever at $5 million for this year, it's open highways for Bengals right guard Dalton Risner.

If you want to know why this is the Bengals' most popular re-signing in recent years, you have to know that big heart the fans love and his locker room covets came from little places like that two-door coup.

"He's a blue-collar kid. He's a grinder, and one of the things that makes him fit really well in Cincinnati," Mitch says.

As the prairie whizzed by while the news conference streamed, there couldn't help but be some flashbacks. After all, until Manhattan, where Bill Snyder got him for Kansas State, Mitch coached Dalton all the way. Youth leagues. Middle school. Wiggins High School, population 120 in the smallest class in Colorado, which they won twice under Mitch with 16-man rosters.

That benching last season against Jacksonville?

Not the only time he's ever been benched. His dad got him at least twice, once in eighth grade when he insisted he was a running back and proved he wasn't. And once during seven-on-seven, where Mitch had him as a huge post-up tight end enraging opposing coaches.

"Dalton is the kind of guy who has a big, big motor, and he just thinks he can do and accomplish everything, which is what it takes when you play in the National Football League," Mitch Risner says. "We were playing seven on seven and our quarterback, his younger brother, broke his nose. Quarterback. He thought it looked easy. On his first play, he threw a pick-six."

Another benching.

From what Dalton saw from the passenger seat, Mitch was always grinding, too, a juggling magician. The duties with his five boys. Coaching. Working in sales. He didn't see Mitch sleep a lot. He still doesn't. Mitch has retired from coaching, but all those sales jobs sprouted into a vice presidency as chief revenue officer running a global sales team for a software company.

"I think that's what a good parent should do, and put their kids first," Mitch says. "Give them a pavement and not a dirt road to find their path."

But his kids found out early that Division I coaches don't follow the pavement to the smallest schools in the state. Mitch would set Dalton up next to him in his office in the bid for that elusive scholarship, giving him college athletics directories packed with phone numbers and tips on what to say.

If someone ever picked up the phone.

"I gave him the numbers he had to hit each week," Mitch says. "After school, after practice, phone calls and emails. I was coaching him on what to say, how to say it, how to have an engaging conversation. And call after call after call, nobody's there. Nobody answered. He'd call the front desk. Back in those days, X wasn't the thing, and coaches actually responded via email and or text. If you could get them. A lot of unanswered phone calls, and at one point we got in the car."

Pounding the pavement turned into the yellow brick road. At Kansas State's junior day, Snyder offered the first scholarship. That's when Mitch got the sense that he would become more taken with the man he helped raise than the player.

"Dalton wanted to commit that day. And I told him, this thing just started. Offers are really starting to roll in. Let's wait. He was a junior, and he knew where he wanted to play," Mitch Risner says.

"I tried to help him understand. Don't play for the coaches. Don't play for the system. Those guys change. You want to play for the town and the culture. And Kansas is a lot like Wiggins. Everybody's going to the game. Small-town culture, and he just loved it.

He wanted to play for those fans in that town."

During his four seasons at Manhattan, Mitch noticed whenever his son walked through the athletic center, the support staff, people like the cooks and the janitors, would light up when they saw him.

"No matter who it was, trainers, the guy who threw out the garbage, he'd always say hello," Mitch says.

The Bengals seem to have been fated to be the logical place that hugged his son back after three years of looking for a home. Mitch now lives in Norman, Okla., about 10 minutes from Bengals head coach Zac Taylor’s boyhood neighborhood. About a month after Dalton signed in Cincinnati, Mitch blindly ran into Sherwood Taylor, and now one of his pickleball partners is Zac Taylor's father.

It was quite a ride back to Norman. The best part of the news conference, Mitch says, was the opening question. Which Dalton chose not to answer.

"Before taking any question, he basically said let me tell you how I'm feeling right now. And he just talked about gratitude … Slow down for a minute, stop and pause, reflect and say, Hey, mind you. Just so excited to be here, and here's why, and then give your own voice.

"And I was proud that he had the maturity to just state where he's coming from right now today, and be vulnerable enough to express his emotions. I thought that was a pretty mature move."

It's been that kind of a drive. On this particular drive home, Mitch Risner thought about that tiny Toyota of years ago. They almost didn't rent it.

"We kept the car," says Mitch amid the flashbacks on the prairie. "We said, 'Let's go make this a journey, and this is going to be part of the story."