Things have slowed down for speedy Darryl MaGee.

He is no longer the subject of any stories in the Chicago Tribune. Sportscenter, WGN and ESPN radio have stopped calling. Life for the University of Illinois junior — and part-time ball boy for the Chicago Bears — is back to normal.

More than two weeks have passed since MaGee was famously highlighted by ESPN personality Chris Berman for running all the way to the end zone alongside Bears wide receiver Johnny Knox.

“It does seem like a long way away,” MaGee said. “It was real big for a week and then it kind of trailed off, so everything’s gotten back to normal again, and the phone calls have stopped, the e-mails have kind of slowed down a little bit.”

On Oct. 4, after Knox returned a Detroit Lions kickoff for a 102-yard touchdown, Berman highlighted MaGee for his sprint down the sideline, in which he appeared to outrun the Lions coverage and nearly keep up with Knox — all while carrying three footballs.

To MaGee’s surprise, the clip of his run was then replayed multiple times during Monday Night Football the next day.

The long-time Bears ball boy said he was notified the clip would run before that Monday’s game, “but then they played it again at halftime, and then they did it again at postgame, and that’s when I was like ‘Wow, I guess it is pretty big now,’” said MaGee, a kinesiology major.

Chris Reinbold, junior in history, said he saw MaGee’s run when it happened and again when it was highlighted by Berman. His roommate later told him that MaGee was a student at the University.

“I thought it was pretty interesting that he’s keeping up with Johnny Knox … and he was carrying a ball in each hand and he had a ball in a pouch, that was pretty cool,” Reinbold said.

The clip eventually made it to YouTube, and such was the beginning of MaGee’s 15 minutes of fame.

MaGee said he was taken by surprise by the media hype surrounding his sprint mainly because the run down the sideline was not an uncommon thing for him to do.

“Anybody that knows me knows that I do that kind of stuff all the time,” MaGee said. “All the players already joke around with me. I’m always running up and down the sidelines.”

The 24-year-old has been running down the sidelines of Soldier Field for quite some time. He started working for the Bears while attending Waukegan High School, and during that time, he met Bears head equipment manager Tony Medlin, who MaGee said acted as a mentor to him as he gradually moved up to work all season.

“At first it didn’t seem like a big deal because I was only doing training camps,” MaGee said. “But after I started doing more with the Bears and actually working more with the players and hands on, it became a cool job, especially from working all the games and being on the sidelines and meeting all these players that I had only seen on TV.”

MaGee took some time off from college after his sophomore year at the University and said it was during that period that he worked full time for the Bears, even traveling with them when they went to the Super Bowl in 2006.

Calling himself a “laid-back guy,” MaGee has never told many people about his job. And taking into account Champaign’s distance from Soldier Field, he said his recent fame never reached the height on campus that it did in Chicago.

“It didn’t really get too big here in Champaign,” he said. “A lot of people still don’t even know what I did or who I am. Or people know of it but don’t know that it was me who actually did it … In a kinesiology class, I’ve actually heard a guy that was talking about ‘the ball boy that ran back,’ and I just laughed because he doesn’t even know it’s me that he’s talking about.”

Of course, it didn’t take long after the clip was first aired for MaGee’s friends and family to find out about it.

Adrian Walker has been friends with MaGee since they met through the Illini track and field team — which MaGee said he tried out for as a sophomore in 2004.

Walker, a 2007 alumnus who won All-America accolades while at Illinois, found out about MaGee’s run through Facebook.

“I kind of wonder how my speed would compare to some of the guys in the NFL, and just to see Darryl out there and all those sports announcers giving him his props, it was kind of cool to see,” Walker said.

MaGee said at this point, nearly all of his friends and family know of his run, and while things have mostly settled down, he pointed to one place where that is not the case.

“I have been talking to some of my co-workers with the Bears, and they’ve been saying that it’s all over the locker room, they’ve been talking about it, all the equipment manager meetings, they’ve been talking about it, even some of the scouts that know me have been making fun of me,” MaGee said.

But outside the locker room the ball boy’s fame is quickly settling down, and the world is beginning to find new unique events to focus on. A YouTube search of “Bears ball boy” this week yielded a few clips of MaGee’s run — with more than 100,000 views ­— but also one clip of a kickoff that occurred last Sunday at the Raiders-Eagles game.

As the Raiders were about to kick off, a pigeon lined up with them and then followed the team all the way down the field to where the action was.

The video’s title on YouTube “Faster than Bears ball boy? — A pigeon is on the field with the Raiders special teams.”

MaGee laughed when hearing of the pigeon’s 15 minutes of fame.

“I actually watched that yesterday. I was like ‘Wow, there’s something new now,’” he chuckled.