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DETROIT - Usually on Media Day at the Super Bowl, the long snapper is the loneliest man in the stadium. He sits in the stands, several rows from the field, and watches his teammates get swarmed by writers and broadcasters and the occasional clown like comedian Gilbert Gottfried.

He is anonymous. The man least likely to make an impact on the game. During the hurly-burly of Super Bowl week he lives in splendid isolation, not burdened by the crush of questions that falls on the rest of the team.

But early Tuesday afternoon, Seahawks long snapper J.P. Darche was awash in media, peppered with questions in both English and French. There was Darche, a somebody at Super Bowl XL.

"I'm assuming all those reporters are Canadian and French-speaking, so who else are they going to talk to?" joked Seattle center Robbie Tobek, Darche's good friend. "You've got French reporters, you go to the one guy who speaks French. Where else are they going to go?"

The funny thing is, Darche has a story to tell. Probably no player took a more circuitous route to this game. He was supposed to be an orthopedic surgeon by now, unscrambling ligaments and repairing tendons at a hospital in Montreal.

He even completed two years of medical school at McGill College in Montreal, before the Toronto Argonauts offered him a job as a linebacker in the Canadian Football League. He asked for and got a one-year leave of absence from McGill, where he had played during his undergraduate years.

Late that season, Darche broke his leg.

"I thought that was it. Playing professional sports was a dream of mine, and I'd done it and now I was going back to med school," he said.

But the Seahawks invited him to a minicamp in 2000. He had a one-day competition against six other snappers. He took 15 punt snaps and 15 placekicking snaps and was offered a job. The first NFL game he saw in person was the first one he played in, September 2000 in Miami.

Now, six years later, Darche, who turns 31 later this month, still is playing football. That doctor thing still is on hold.

"My teammates ask me sometimes why I play football when I could make a lot more money as a doctor," Darche told the crowd that surrounded him for most of the hourlong interview session. "I told them they're crazy. I'm making much more in football."

Besides, because of football, Darche is becoming a Canadian celebrity. The day after the Seahawks won the NFC championship, he called his parents, and his mother told him she was too busy to talk. A television crew was in their living room preparing to do an interview. She had makeup to apply.

"They've never been interviewed before, so they're living kind of a different experience," Darche said. "They were doing the 'CBC Morning Show' today. They've done, like, three interviews a week. I tell my dad he's a bigger star than I am."

Darche is only the second Canadian college player to play in the Super Bowl. Ken Clark of the Los Angeles Rams punted in 1980.

"I think in Canada, I'm kind of a novelty item right now," Darche said. "I'm used to giving, like, one interview a year. Now it's a lot more in one day. I just think in Canada, they've got a homegrown kid who's playing in the biggest game there is and that's kind of exciting."

Darche brought both video and still cameras to Media Day to record the event for his wife and three kids. He writes in a diary every night, and his entry for Tuesday might read something like, "Media Day — Incroyable!"

"The whole week I've been thinking about where I came from, where my football career started. In high school, when I was 14, I just thought playing football was the coolest thing," Darche said. "All these years later, I never thought I'd be here to enjoy this Super Bowl. It's a pretty special feeling.

"When I went to college, my whole focus was getting the grades to get into med school. I wanted to be a doctor. I think I was as excited the day I got the letter that said I had been accepted into med school as I am now. It was a thrill. I had worked so hard for it."

Like most Canadians, Darche grew up wanting to play in the Stanley Cup, not the Super Bowl. Hockey was his passion. But he was too slow and spent most of his hockey career protecting his brother, Mathieu, who played in the NHL with Columbus and Nashville and now plays professionally in Germany.

"The Stanley Cup was never a reality, but representing Canada in this game is, and it's an honor. It really is," Darche said. "I hope there are some French Canadian kids who will be watching the Super Bowl and it will be an extra incentive for them. To know that if you work at it and you're good enough, it doesn't matter where you're from or where you've played, it can happen. You can play in the Super Bowl."

And when his career is done, the last snap made, Darche will begin again the quest he started seven years ago at McGill.

"I talk to some people who were in school with me and now they're full-fledged doctors. They graduated," Darche said. "They've done their residency and they're done. And I tell them I'm jealous of them and they say to me, 'Are you crazy? We'd kill to be able to do what you're doing.'

"Right now I'm doing this a year at a time. You never know what can happen — an injury, or they don't want you any more. Hopefully, it will last a few more years. Then, when football is all over, I hope they'll let me back into med school. That's my plan. I want to be in the doctor business."

The public-address system inside Ford Field announced the end of the interview session. Media Day was over and the cameras hanging off J.P. Darche's wrist hadn't been used.

The long snapper is a story at Super Bowl XL. Incroyable!