In middle school, Brandon Paul dreamed of the tunnel. 

The thumping of the drums. The orange and blue blur of the crowd. The change from the dark Assembly Hall corridor to the light hovering over the court, signaling the start the show.

It’s where he sinks into his focus and channels his rage.

Fellow senior Tyler Griffey understands Paul’s game. He’s seen him slip into the tunnel on more than a few occasions.

“When someone pisses him off or gets him angry, it’s over,” Griffey said. “He really locks in, and then anything’s possible.”

When Paul slips into his tunnel, it’s almost like he can’t miss.

Saturday’s senior day matchup against Nebraska is vital to the Illini’s postseason hopes. If Illinois wins, giving it eight in Big Ten play, it will likely have its ticket punched to the NCAA tournament after missing the postseason entirely in 2011-12.

But for Paul, Saturday will be the last time he passes through the tunnel at Assembly Hall as a player. That’s what he’ll miss most about his time at Illinois. It’s when he gets to be the star of the show, the night’s headlining entertainer.

“I’m thinking about what I’m going to do, obviously, when I get done with my basketball career. I know that I’m still going to be a pretty young guy,” Paul said. “I don’t think I want to go into coaching. I don’t think I have the patience for that. I think I want to do something with entertainment, whether it’s ESPN or transition into acting. I know I want to entertain people.”

There’s no question he has the capacity to do so.

Griffey said he could definitely see Paul entering the entertainment industry. He’s tried to act around the team since he arrived on campus, reciting goofy movie lines to lighten up the mood when things have turned grim.

While Paul has frustrated at times — he leads Illinois with 83 turnovers this season and is fourth-worst on the team with a 40 percent field goal percentage — he’s also proved that he can dazzle.

In his first game at Illinois, Paul’s 22-point performance against SIU-Edwardsville broke Illini all-time leading scorer Deon Thomas’ freshman scoring record. That set the bar high.

He surpassed it with last season’s historic 43-point performance against then-No.5 Buckeyes on Jan. 10, 2011, cementing his name in Illinois’ record books and flashing the potential that one day he might have the chance to play basketball professionally.

His 35-point nationally televised performance at Gonzaga in the Illini’s Dec. 8 win over No. 10 Gonzaga affirmed Illinois’ Maui Tournament Championship was no fluke and added credibility to his team’s red-hot start under first-year coach John Groce.

The difference, in the early going of this season, was Paul’s consistency scoring the ball. Experts placed him squarely in the NBA draft picture, some even ranking him a lottery pick.

But as of late, Paul’s become accustomed to practicing his long-term career goals on the court, flailing his body to tempt refs into awarding him a whistle. The points have stopped flowing in bunches. Since his 21-point performance in Illinois’ Feb. 7 win against No. 1 Indiana,Paul is averaging 9.4 points per game over the five-game stretch. He scored three points Feb. 13 against Purdue.

Say what you want about Paul’s game. Guess what? He doesn’t care. Actually, he’s shut you off. Initially, Paul invited fans to text him (he responded to over 1,000 questions), watch him prank his teammates on his YouTube channel and Snapchat him funny pictures. Then his followers turned on him, criticizing him both publicly and personally via social media for shooting too much.

During a stretch when the Illini lost six of seven, Groce banned his players’ Twitter accounts to avoid negativity.

“The games we were losing, we got better through those stretches,” Paul said. “People didn’t start believing in us again until we started winning. I think at the end of the day all we got to do is worry about what we feel as a team.”

He’s built this way. He’s a shooter. He can be a dynamic scorer and light a team up for 43 points in a game or shoot 1-for-11, as he did in the Illini’s Jan. 12 embarrassment in Madison, where they lost 74-51 to Wisconsin.

Whether you like how he goes about it, there’s no doubt Paul ranks among the most talented Illinois scorers of the last decade. During Illinois’ Feb. 21 win over Penn State, Paul became just the 10th player in school history to score 1,500 points.

And as of late, during a stretch where he hasn’t reached the tunnel in a while, he’s drastically improved his defense. Groce complimented Paul after the Illini’s Feb. 17 game against Northwestern for playing one of the best games he’s had all season. Paul played stellar defense, dished out five assists and grabbed six boards. He scored just eight points in the Illini’s blowout win.

It’s never been about Paul’s personal numbers. Despite four years and all the access fans could possibly want into his life, Paul is still misunderstood.

He’s been quite possibly the most studious athlete on the basketball team for a while, finishing his classes last semester so he could focus on the basketball season and his internship at the I Hotel as the season dragged on into it’s most important stretch. The recreation, sports and tourism major is so studious, in fact, Paul said he will likely talk to former Flying Illini player and current ESPN announcer Stephen Bardo about transitioning from athletics to broadcasting later in his career.

“I took advantage of the free education, working with the professors that I’ve had and the extra school work that I took the time to do,” Paul said. “A lot of people come here and they don’t think about their education as much as their athletic ability. I think the one thing about that, coming to a great university like this, I can get two things out of the deal. I can get a great athletic career and a great education.”

He also never gave up on former Illinois head coach Bruce Weber, who Paul respected from the moment he walked on campus. In his freshman year, he once quieted a crowded room because he saw pretaped footage of Weber speaking after practice on a local evening news program. When Weber was fired, Paul was broken up that his recruiting class, prematurely carrying last year’s team, couldn’t save his coach’s job.

Yet when Groce and his staff arrived in Champaign, Paul embraced the new system, watching hours of tape when he couldn’t practice over the summer due to a broken jaw.

“The best thing about Brandon Paul is he’s allowed us to coach him at a high level,” Groce said after the Maui Tournament. “I’m very thankful for that with Brandon. You could say that’s what he should do, and you’re right that’s what good players do, but he handles coaching really well.”

Paul will be honored at midcourt before Saturday’s game, along with the four other graduating seniors. He’ll receive his framed No. 3 jersey and will probably cry, just as he did when the seniors were honored his sophomore year. He always cries when his mom sheds a tear, and he’s near certain she won’t keep it together.

“That’s like pretty much my weakness,” he said.

It’ll also likely happen because Paul loves this place. He’s always wanted to be here.

When Paul first stepped foot in Assembly Hall, he initially envisioned coming through that tunnel before a game. He was in eighth grade attending Weber’s team basketball camp. He was trying to prove himself in front of the coaches, showing Weber and his staff that he belonged on their recruiting map.

An older player in the camp, and a friend of Paul’s, prank called him that night, pretending to be one of the coaches.

“They were like: ‘Yeah, we saw you play. We want to invite you to a elite camp,’” Paul said. “They got me going then, so me and my buddies were all amped up about that.”

Paul tasted what it’d feel like to be accepted at Illinois, and he became determined to make it back to Champaign with a scholarship offer. Two years later, as a sophomore, Paul committed and never wavered as he gained more notoriety, finishing his senior year as Illinois’ Mr. Basketball.

He’s always wanted to be successful at Illinois.

Despite public claims from Bardo that Paul and his recruiting class have lacked toughness, they’ve never quit. Paul and fellow senior D.J. Richardson were merely learning how to cope with assuming leadership roles and losing players who left the program early.

After Kansas’ Elijah Johnson dropped 39 points against Iowa State on Monday, Basketball Prospectus writer John Gasaway called the performance Johnson’s “Brandon Paul moment.” The kid couldn’t miss from anywhere on the court.

Maybe he too felt what it was like to enter the tunnel and carry his team.

But of all the games Paul has finished as the leading scorer or finished with a record-breaking performance, his favorite memory is winning the Maui Tournament, when his entire team was clicking on all cylinders and never trailed over all three games.

That’s because his entire team walked through the tunnel alongside him. They all had their Brandon Paul moment.

Ethan can be reached at [email protected] and @AsOfTheSky.