GREEN BAY, Wis. -- At 7 years old, Brandon Cisse knew what he wanted and where he wanted to do it. He came to that realization when he was with his older cousin at Williams-Brice Stadium to watch a University of South Carolina football game.
That cousin came home and told his aunt, Brandon's mom, exactly what he said.
"As a matter of fact, I have a picture of him and his cousin Justin at that game," Kendria Cisse recalled this week in an interview with ESPN. "His cousin remembers it to this day because he told him, 'One day I'm going to play on that field.'"
The story of how Cisse got there -- and eventually became a member of the Green Bay Packers, who selected the South Carolina cornerback in the second round of last week's NFL draft -- is far more complicated than that.
Kendria and Cedric Cisse (pronounced SEE'-say) had a decision to make every time they wanted to go shopping when Brandon was a toddler.
Which parent would go to the store, and which one would stay home with Brandon?
They learned early on that they could not, under any circumstances, take him with them.
"Because he would take off and run, sprinting down the aisles," Kendria said. "He was walking at 9 months. At 12 months, he was running laps."
And he would not stop.
"He never got tired," she said, laughing. "Like Forrest Gump. Run Forrest! That was definitely him."
However, football to the Cisse children was soccer at an early age. Cedric, a native of France, had little interest in American football when he came to the United States as a foreign exchange student in high school, where he met Kendria.
So, Brandon and his two brothers played their dad's sport.
"They played soccer when they were playing for parks and rec, and then they joined a soccer club," Kendria said. "They've been playing since they were 4 or 5 years old."
All the while, Brandon had one eye on football.
"When every other kid was watching cartoons, he was watching ESPN," Kendria said. "He knew the teams. He would have a conversation with my uncle, and he would say, 'This kid is amazing, I'm talking to him like I'm talking to an adult about football.'"
The Cisses' hometown of Sumter, South Carolina, is only an hour away from the University of South Carolina. It made it easy for Brandon to attend games there.
But at one point, Brandon thought that might be the only way he'd ever get inside that stadium.
By the end of his junior year at Lakewood High School, he had received numerous scholarship offers. None, however, was from a Power 5 school.
The summer before his senior year of high school, he decided to take one more shot at attracting the attention of a bigger program. But it wasn't South Carolina, which showed little or no interest at the time.
Instead, he opted for NC State, where a year earlier he had attended a 7-on-7 camp.
To hear Cisse tell it earlier this year at the NFL combine, he didn't want to put his hardworking parents out any more than he already had. He felt asking them for $100 to attend one more camp at NC State was a big request.
"I had to beg my mom for $100 to go to the NC state camp," Cisse said earlier this year. "So I was like, 'Hey, mom, I'm not going to [make] you wrong, [if] you took a chance on me.'"
To hear Kendria tell it, she couldn't understand why he wanted to attend only one camp. Kendria, a nurse, and Cedric, a paralegal, were willing to send him to more than one.
"He was like, 'I'm only doing one camp that year,' and that's the one he wanted," said Kendria, who works at Lakewood High School. "Just that one, I don't know what his reasons were. Just that one. I was like, you don't want to do [more]?"
It was at that camp that NC State offered him his dream of playing high major college football, and he took it, seemingly ending his other dream of playing for the home-state Gamecocks.
"I never really pictured him getting in the transfer portal to come back here," Kendria said. "It just happened that the cards aligned."
After two years at NC State, Cisse transferred to South Carolina.
He jumped out right away, with South Carolina coaches naming him newcomer of the spring. He became an immediate starter at cornerback and finished tied for second on the team in pass breakups while adding an interception and a forced fumble in 12 games.
After one season at his dream school, he decided to pursue his other dream: to play in the NFL.
"It's something I believed since I was a little kid, so it's just exciting to see it come true," Cisse said. "But it's not where the job ends, and just know that I've got to take it to another level."
At age 20, as one of the youngest players in the draft, he became the sixth cornerback to come off the board when the Packers picked him at No. 52.
"There's not a lot of 20-year-olds in the draft," Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst said after picking Cisse. "We took one one time in Kenny Clark, and that worked out pretty well. We hope this works out that well. No hesitation."
It should not have been a surprise to anyone that the Packers picked Cisse. The week of the draft, Gutekunst essentially laid out his draft plans when he said he needed to address two positions: cornerback and nose tackle. He did just that with his first two picks: Cisse in the second round and Missouri defensive tackle Chris McClellan in the third. Gutekunst added another cornerback, Alabama's Domani Jackson, in the sixth.
The Packers were on Cisse early. South Carolina was one the regular stops on the scouting trail for Packers national scout Mike Owen.
"I spent a lot of time with this kid," Owen said. "I live 35 minutes from the University of South Carolina, so I spent a lot of time with him. When you go there, they spoke highly of him in the weight room, at practice. Smart kid, always watching a ton of football.
"Every time I went there, he was in the recruiting office watching the NFL, college or high school. That's what I love about the kid. He really loves football at the end of the day."
Owen noticed something else.
"You can feel that chip on his shoulder when you talk to him, about getting overlooked by South Carolina, coming full circle and then really helping his team and helping that defense elevate to a different level," Owen said. "You could still see he's got that chip on his shoulder. He still holds it today. I hope he carries it on as he's in the NFL."