FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. — About 20 minutes after walking into opening day at the Minnesota State Fair, with microphone in hand, fanny pack around his waist, and baseball cap covering the faded “Monsters, Inc.” character painted on his head, Dragan Kesich wanders past the line for Pronto Pups corn dogs. He says he smells camels. Or cows. Or something.

It’s probably horses. Mostly horses, anyway. The 27,500-square-foot barn is off to the right.

“Ooh, you wanna go see some horses?” Kesich suggests to the small group tailing him. “Let’s see some horses.”

Nearly 2 million people will attend this 12-day spectacle. The country’s most colorful kicker, a 6-foot-4, 240-pound left-footer who thinks he could beat a cheetah in a fight, is one of one. He records an episode of his preseason vlog, “Kamp With Kesich,” in which fairgoers must correctly pronounce the names of three teammates to win a Gophers towel. He rides the Rock Star, discusses Brett Favre with a total stranger, sits in the audience for a taping of P.J. Fleck’s coach’s show, eats a turkey leg, takes pictures with fans, plots a stop at Sweet Martha’s Cookie Jar and tries to win a stuffed animal for the fifth straight year. For two hours, Dragan Kesich happens to the State Fair, and not the other way around.

“He’s the most interesting guy I’ve ever met in my life, I reckon, by a mile,” says Minnesota punter Mark Crawford, who, at age 30, has lived a bit.

There is, unavoidably, a binary side to Kesich’s existence. Make or miss. Black or white. He’ll feel that acutely nine days from this moment. And it’s up to him to be a light, even when things get a little dark.

For now, Kesich loops through the horse barn, marveling at the Clydesdales while also trying to interview one. Upon finding an empty stall, he walks in to explore it. Linebacker Cody Lindenberg, one of his best friends, then spies a nearby stack of bales.

“You’re not feeding me hay, bro,” Kesich declares. “We’re not doing that.”

In moments, the reigning Big Ten kicker of the year gnaws at a handful of hay strands.

Upon leaving the barn, Kesich visits a smoothie stand and orders a palate-cleansing Strawberry Squeeze. He makes one additional request.

“Can I get the Tiki cup?” he asks.

It’s Aug. 29, 2024. Two seconds left against North Carolina. Minnesota trails by two and Dragan Kesich has another chance to win a season opener with a 47-yard field goal. This is how he began his breakout 2023 season, too: same distance, tie game against Nebraska, three seconds on the clock, and the kick split the uprights. Everyone thought he’d make that one. Everyone knew he’d make this one. And the ball leaves Kesich’s foot and hooks wide right.

He walks off the Huntington Bank Stadium field, head hung low. Teammates console him. Fleck declares unwavering belief during a postgame news conference. Still, in the locker room, the glow drains from one of college football’s most vibrant personalities … for a while.

Around 1 a.m., Kesich decides to be in a happy place.

“Let’s go to Taco Bell,” he declares to his roommates.

The tradition started in 2021 with Crawford and linebacker Derik LeCaptain. After every game, whatever time it is, they decompress at a nearby Taco Bell. This night would be no different. Kesich would be gutted, then stuff his gut with a Cheesy Gordita Crunch box. “You can’t ride the emotional roller coaster as a kicker,” he says. “Let’s say I would’ve made that kick. I can’t act any differently, you feel me? I just gotta be who I am.”

It’s how a human kaleidoscope does this job. How he makes his way through missing as many kicks (four) in the first four games of 2024 as he did in all of 2023. There are people in the world trying to be what they’re supposed to be, Fleck muses. Or they try to be different. His kicker does not try. Dragan Kesich is, the Gophers coach says, “100 percent authentic,” no matter what.

Let us count the ways.

The family history. Kesich’s great-grandfather was bound for Belgrade, Serbia, for work when the Croatian army stopped his train. The Serbians were pulled off the train, tied together in pairs and thrown into a pit with water at the bottom. Kesich’s great-grandfather caught hold of something – “My grandpa said a tree branch,” Kesich says – and held on until dark. He then climbed out and was rescued by the Serbian army.

In the mid-1990s, with war seizing the region, his grandparents fled on a seven-day tractor ride from Golubic, a village in the city of Knin, Croatia, to Belgrade. They flew back to America. A bomb fell on their house not long after. Harrowing stuff. But there’s something about having steel in your blood. “It doesn’t feel real,” Kesich says. “I’m like, I don’t know how you guys went through that.”

The soccer punt. By eighth grade, Kesich began to take kicking seriously enough to start getting noticed. There was still the matter of his family’s love for soccer – Kesich says he has a plaque for scoring 100 goals in one season as a youth player, and his brother played at Division II Wisconsin-Parkside – until a fateful coaching change at Oak Creek (Wis.) High. The new boys soccer coach made running two miles in 12 minutes mandatory for training. This prompted Kesich’s early retirement. “And, of course, they didn’t even end up doing it,” he says now. “I was like, well, that was just a tactic to get a guy like me out of there. So it worked.”

The hair. For the sake of change, Kesich decided to bleach his hair in 2022. At practice, Fleck offered a thought: It was a blank canvas. Kesich should paint it.

Kesich commissioned Crawford’s then-girlfriend, an art major, for the work. The first design was flames. Then, a cheetah print. Pokemon Go was big with Minnesota football in early 2023, so Squirtle – “a great Pokemon,” Kesich notes – appeared on his dome. There has been a blue arrow inspired by “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” a playing-card theme and, lastly, the face of Mike Wazowski from “Monsters, Inc.” It’s been a preseason-only ritual, and not accidentally, it’s created some levity for a group in need of it during the grind. “How easy is it to go up and have a conversation with the guy who’s got Mike Wazowski from ‘Monsters, Inc.’ painted in his hair?” LeCaptain says.

Miscellaneous Dragan tales. To begin with, it’s pronounced Drag-AHN, but people call him “Dragon” anyway. Kesich took a bowling class at Minnesota, decided to buy his own ball and says he’s rolled a high game of 244. He spent the bulk of a Saturday night three years ago attempting to break the record on a Pop-A-Shot machine in the players’ lounge, while LeCaptain cheered him on. (He did set the record.) He loves animated movies and spent a recent off-day rewatching “Ratatouille” and “The Incredibles.” He is an avid sleeper who once asked Crawford to wake him up shortly before a massage appointment. “It was like 9:30 at night,” the punter says. The massage was at 12:55 p.m. the next day.

When Kesich discovered his beloved Milwaukee Bucks were using Minnesota’s basketball facility for a workout, he dropped everything, donned a green Bucks jumpsuit and waited outside for autographs. Only Giannis Antetokounmpo turned him down.

“He’s a kid at heart,” Crawford says, “but it’s a big heart, that’s for sure.”

The Great Animal Fight Debate. One day, as they are wont to do, Kesich and Crawford started a locker room discussion about a dumb topic: Wild animals you could defeat in a fight.

An elephant was a no. So were lions and giraffes and grizzly bears, though Kesich added an asterisk to black bears. “Because black bears eat fruit,” he reasons. Then someone brought up a cheetah. Binary challenge. Him and a carnivore from the wilds of Africa. Do or die.

Guess where Dragan Kesich landed on that.

“If it’s to the death? I think I could,” Kesich says. “There’s the cheetah. I’m right here. Like, my life depends on it. I think I could take it. … Hopefully I’m never in that position. But if I am, I think I can come out victorious.”

He may indeed be, as his buddies put it, delusional. But there’s a reason Dragan Kesich is in the middle of everything for Minnesota and not a sideshow.

Because the stories don’t end there.

Here’s the other thing Kesich once was: a pudgy teenager with a big leg but not enough accuracy to be a reliable Big Ten kicker.

“He looked a little bit more like a high school right guard,” Fleck says of Kesich, the prospect. He weighed in at 270 pounds after arriving at Minnesota. Little of it could be considered good weight. “It was not a good place,” Kesich concedes.

So he started running again. He quit drinking soda. He cut out Twix bars as a bedtime snack, among other processed-sugar temptations. All that and the dedicated conditioning program for Gophers specialists shaved 40 pounds off his frame. Dragan Kesich got serious and quickly worked his way into looking like a college football player.

Performing like one took longer.

As a true freshman in 2020, Kesich only handled kickoffs. What might’ve been an open door for 2021 closed to a crack in the offseason: Minnesota plucked Matthew Trickett, an all-MAC kicker from Kent State, out of the transfer portal. Kesich was happy to let the best man win the job. He was less thrilled when that wasn’t him. “I was like, dang, maybe they don’t believe in me, maybe they don’t trust me here,” he says. Trickett attempted 43 field goals over the next two seasons. Kesich attempted one. Understanding why that happened was precisely what Kesich needed. “I learned so much under him in those two years,” he says of Trickett now. “He got me to where I am.”

Kesich obsessed over consistency in his approach, staying light on his feet, getting his placement right. If he wasn’t spending hours working with his kicking coach, Luke Radke, when home in Wisconsin, he was texting Radke for drills to do behind the curtain at Minnesota. He learned how to manage his temperament. He won the starting job for 2023 and connected on 23 of 27 attempts, without missing an extra point. Everyone remembers the Nebraska winner, but Kesich is prouder of his four makes in an upset win at Iowa. The Big Ten kicker of the year award was a validation – “It’s something you never think would happen,” Kesich says – but it was also trimming. For years, the light was there only if he squinted. He marched toward it anyway and now is the program’s all-time leader in field goals from 50 yards and beyond.

That’s how a kicker works his way into the heart of everything.

“He’s one of the most influential leaders on our team, and it’s not even a question,” LeCaptain says.

Part of it is acting like the life of an everyday party and the magnetism that creates. But the blue water bottle Minnesota players must carry around in training camp as a reminder to hydrate? Kesich carries it all season. If lyrics get a little profane over the locker room speaker system, Kesich shuts off the music, lest it offend someone passing through the building. Should a player challenge him on that, well, he’s a 6-4, 240-pound guy who knows the rules. “You don’t see that,” Lindenberg says. “You don’t really see kickers as involved. He’s holding people accountable. He’s doing all the right things.”

Says Fleck: “He’s different from the normal perception of what a kicker is mentally and emotionally. He is a football player. That’s what makes him so connected to our team.”

With things to straighten out in every sense, and with rival Iowa visiting last weekend, Kesich got to work. Again. He focused on finishing his motion downfield. Keeping his club (left) foot open longer. Keeping his eyes back so his hips didn’t turn as much. He even wondered if anyone would let him bring the Floyd of Rosedale trophy to Taco Bell if Minnesota won.

There would be no reprise of 2023. Again. Kesich didn’t attempt a field goal in a 31-14 loss, much less make four. But here comes Michigan, the defending national champions. Such is the life. Another week, and he has to believe the light is out there somewhere.

“A quarterback, they’ve got, what, 40 throws a game?” Kesich says. “A kicker, you got two on average a game? So when you miss one it’s kind of just like that: All right, boom, whatever, next one. I’d say I’ve always had that.”

Dragan Kesich celebrates with P. J. Fleck after defeating Nebraska in the 2023 season opener. (Bailey Hillesheim / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

At 10:58 a.m., a throng of large humans in matching gold T-shirts and maroon shorts enters the Minnesota State Fair through a gate off Randall Avenue. Without much ado, Dragan Kesich sorts through some papers with his teammates’ names on them, separating the easy ones to pronounce from the hard ones, and collects a few Gophers to stand behind him as he records an intro for this “Kamp With Kesich” featurette.

He tells everyone to enjoy the ride.

And we’re off.

“Last time, I rode the slingshot – you know the one that shoots you into the air?” Kesich says, walking past lampposts affixed with “12 Days of Fun” banners. “I’m never doing that again.”

So there are places past the edge of the map in Dragan’s world, but only because he’s already visited and doesn’t want to go back.

Most everything else, today and every day, is fair game.

Kesich cracks up when he sees offensive linemen trying on samurai hats. (“We gotta get that.”) He notes how convenient Sweet Martha’s, with its literal buckets of chocolate chip cookies, is to the way out. (“We’ll get those later. I gotta savor those.”) He wonders aloud if a kid walking around with a recorder can play “Hot Cross Buns.” He talks Packers and Vikings with a complete stranger who has a very complicated and somewhat unintelligible theory about Brett Favre, locked into the conversation the whole time. He does not cut the first two “Kamp With Kesich” contestants any slack for mispronouncing the third and most difficult name he gives them, though the one who can’t get “Oberhiri Eyafe” correct walks away unaware that he has company.

“Guys, I gotta be honest,” Kesich says, after moving along. “I have no idea how to pronounce Obie’s name.”

After touring the horse barn, he tells a woman who asks for a picture that it’ll cost her 50 bucks, and then bursts out laughing. He hands out a prize to a fairgoer who gets Eyafe as the third name to pronounce – “Give him his towel, baby!” – while also conceding he still has no idea if it was right. After 40 minutes of this, Kesich’s attention turns to the Mighty Midway, and he asks Lindenberg if he wants to go on the Rock Star. Lindenberg says the pendulum-like ride isn’t good enough.

A couple minutes later, the Rock Star line comprises four people: Two kids, and two Big Ten football players.

“You ever been on this ride?” Kesich asks one of the boys in front of him. “Let me tell you, it’s the greatest thing ever. Best thing you’ll ever do in your life.”

Upon descending the ride platform – “That was amazing,” Kesich reports – he calculates there is enough time to win a stuffed animal. He’s 4-for-4 in bringing one back for support staff member Chandler Buning. He cannot leave here without a fifth. Which brings him to a football-throwing game.

One toss. Fit it through a star-shaped hole, get a prize. Make or miss. All or nothing.

First toss is high. Second is, too. Third goes low.

“What am I doing?” Kesich shouts.

His luck does not improve, nor does his mood. So Kesich moves next door to the Cat Rack. Knock over three feline-shaped targets with baseballs, and he can complete his mission with an elephant or frog or purple panda.

All or nothing, again.

He doesn’t win on his first turn, or his second.

“Run it back, run it back,” he says.

He hits two and misses the third.

“DUDE!” Kesich exclaims. “Run it back!”

He misses all three throws. On the next try, he connects on just one. He is both beside himself and out of time, if he wants to catch Fleck’s coaches’ show.

“All right,” Kesich tells the Cat Rack proprietor. “I’ll be back with $100.”

It only takes 70. And it’s a different game, two booths away, with slightly lower stakes: three throws to knock over beer bottles, but the prize increases in size with every successful consecutive try.

Kesich never goes 3-for-3, but he does hit one a bunch of times and two in a row twice. So Buning gets a gray elephant to keep the streak alive. Kesich gives Lindenberg a panda to pass on to his girlfriend. He hands out the smaller prizes to random people at the fair. Mission accomplished.

There is belief, and there is stubbornness, and there is Dragan Kesich, coloring in the overlap.

(Illustration: Meech Robinson / The Athletic; photos courtesy of University of Minnesota)