It was at the 2005 Senior Bowl – Alberta’s annual high-school all-star game – that Mark Kilam first crossed paths with Aaron Crawford.

Kilam was the strength and conditioning coach and defensive assistant for the Calgary Stampeders and participating in the Senior Bowl as a member of the South team’s coaching staff. Crawford was representing Medicine Hat’s Crescent Heights High School and playing for the South all-stars.

“We connected at the Senior Bowl because I knew he was from Medicine Hat and I always tried to relate to the Southern Alberta guys because that’s who I am,” said Kilam, a Lethbridge product. “From there, I kept tabs on him.”

The status checks stopped being necessary three years ago when Crawford signed on to become the Stampeders’ long snapper and play for Kilam, by then Calgary’s special-teams coordinator and assistant head coach.

But before that, tracking Crawford’s career was a full-time job.

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Crawford – who is slated to hit the 150-game milestone on Friday when he and his teammates travel to Winnipeg to face the Blue Bombers – has dealt with more turns than a rotisserie chicken in what has been a very unlikely career.

In fact, before his Senior Bowl meeting with Kilam, Crawford believed the high-school all-star game would be his last hurrah.

“I never thought I would have any football after high school,” said Crawford. “I had no offers for anything – university, junior. Nothing. I had a job in construction lined up.”

Hearing this, Kilam had a word with representatives of various teams who were on site at the Senior Bowl and suddenly Crawford was being recruited.

“I’ve felt indebted to Kilam my whole career because of that,” said Crawford.

The seeds planted at the Senior Bowl led to a handful of stops from coast to coast.

Crawford played junior football in Chilliwack, B.C., until that team folded. Then it was off to Regina and two seasons with the junior Thunder. Now back to British Columbia again and a season with the Victoria Rebels. Squeezed into the early days of his junior career was a two-year stint with the Marauders, a now-defunct senior team in the Alberta Football League.

After the whirlwind tour of the junior ranks, Crawford enrolled at Saint Mary’s University in 2009 and played two seasons with the Huskies.

His amateur career completed, Crawford was drafted by Toronto in the fourth round of the 2012 draft and if you think the trek gets more straightforward at this point, well . . . no.

Crawford was cut by the Argos after training camp in 2012. He joined Saskatchewan’s practice roster for a time and was released. He re-signed with the Roughriders during the off-season but – guess what? – was cut loose again after 2013 training camp. Crawford wound up spending a couple of weeks on the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ practice roster before they too sent him on his way.

He joined his third team of 2013 – Hamilton – on Aug. 31 and saw his first game action, such as it was. Crawford was listed on the Tiger-Cats depth chart as the No. 3 man at defensive end for four games and played special teams and some spot duty on defence but did not record any stats.

After the four-game cup of coffee, he went back on the practice roster and was released in October.

Crawford paid his own way to an open tryout with the fledgling Ottawa Redblacks but failed to land a contract.

“I couldn’t buy my way onto a team,” Crawford quipped.

So, if you’re keeping track, Crawford – 27 years old at this point – had racked up four uneventful games, five pink slips from four different CFL clubs and one don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you.

“I thought that was the end of the road,” Crawford admitted. “That’s when I went and worked for Baron Oilfield. I thought I had failed in football. I told my employer that I’m all-in (with the oilfield job) and I’m done chasing (the football dream). It’s time to be a man and do the realistic thing. So when it comes to preparing to play my 150th game, that’s what I think about most – that I almost packed it up back then.”

Everything changed for Crawford on Sept. 1, 2014.

In the Labour Day Classic against Toronto, the Ticats lost long snapper Marc-Antoine Fortin to an injury. With another game on the docket just six days away, Hamilton reached out to Crawford.

“When they called me, it was instantly, ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “I was just so excited. I had had multiple opportunities, which I was grateful for, but I thought I had blown them. So when another opportunity came along, I had to jump on it.”

Despite having been shuttled from linebacker to fullback to defensive end to defensive tackle in his early stabs at a professional job, Crawford was suddenly a CFL long snapper.

It’s a job he had performed in relief in his final year at Saint Mary’s and had toyed with after practice in the pros, but was hardly a skill he had perfected.

“I was only snapping with one hand at that point,” he said. “It was a long road to doing things the proper way. I had no idea about snapping the ball to a holder. I just thew it at him and he caught it – we’re golden.

“Then they’d keep talking to me about laces and I was like, ‘The holder spins the ball – why are you talking to me?’ Then they explained the process to me about what my job was and how I could help them out, so I started working on that.”

Crawford, refining his skills all along the way, long snapped for the Ticats’ final 10 games of 2014 and played 84 more games with the Tabbies over the course of the five seasons that followed.

But he faced one more detour. In Week 19 of the 2017 season, playing his 63rd consecutive game with the Ticats, disaster struck. Crawford tore his meniscus and his ACL and his season was done.

Eventually.

Bad knee and all, Crawford gutted things out through the end of the game and even recorded a tackle, against Redblacks return ace Diontae Spencer, no less.

The knee required reconstructive surgery and with his contract done at the end of the season, doubts about his future started creeping into Crawford’s mind, especially since his former Hamilton teammate Craig Butler had seen his career cut short by a similar injury

“I thought that was the end,” he said.

But by the sixth game of the 2018 season, a rehabilitated Crawford was back on the job in Steeltown.

All told, Crawford played 98 regular-season games and made two trips to the Grey Cup as a member of the Ticats.

By 2021, Crawford was ready to come home. After the pandemic kiboshed the 2020 campaign, he signed with the Stampeders, reconnected with Kilam and has ever since been part of trinity of specialists with kicker René Paredes and punter Cody Grace.

“Home province, my first professional game was here, the first famous person I ever met was (former Stampeders star linebacker) Alondra Johnson and everything else,” said Crawford. “I was always hoping I could play for Calgary.”

Crawford, wife Angela and five-year-old William have settled in the city while family and friends frequently drive up from the Hat to attend games.

Crawford has logged 51 regular-season appearances with the Red and White and stands of the precipice of a significant service-time milestone of 150 games.

“He got there the hardest way,” said Kilam. “That’s why you’ve got to respect it. He’s had that winding path. It just shows you that everyone’s path is different.

“Not everyone was the superstar U Sports or NCAA player or the high draft pick and all those sexy things. But if guys really want it, they can find that winding road to that end game.”

On the field, Crawford has provided reliable long-snapping for the Stamps. Off the turf, he brings a special ingredient to the group dynamic.

“When things get serious,” chuckled Kilam, “Aaron is always the first one coming out with something goofy or with some joke. I’ll try to be serious and he’ll get a one-liner off.

“I think it’s good to have a little humour.”

Even if that humour is something well below the standards of your better comedy clubs.

“The best way to describe Crawford’s humour,” said Grace, “would be . . . Dad jokes to the T. But he’ll also have a story for every one of the 149 games that he’s played, and if you get him started on it, you’ll be there for however many years he’s played.”

“He does have some good ones,” said Paredes, “and he has some very bad ones, after which I always tell him, ‘That was terrible.’ ”

Guilty as charged, says Crawford.

“I would say René has probably laughed more at me than with me,” he said. “But I don’t care.”

Crawford says his eagerness to make people laugh, even at his own expense, stems from the years of seeing his older brother Brandon fight a long and ultimately losing battle with aplastic anemia, a rare blood disorder.

“He spent a lot of time in hospital and he was getting bad news a lot of times,” said Crawford. “You don’t know what to say and it’s always so heavy, so I’d get used to making a joke about a song lyric on the radio. Or they’d talk about taking a new medication and I’d say, ‘What’s the worst that could happen? It would kill you?’ You’d try to lighten the mood because it was always serious.”

Crawford’s desire to reduce tension at any opportunity carries through to this day, something his co-workers appreciate even as they roll their eyes at Crawford’s corny comments.

“Great guy,” said Grace. “He’ll do anything for you if you ever needed anything. And very reliable in his job as well – as reliable as he is with a bad joke.”

Even Kilam, as intense and fiery a personality as there is on a CFL sideline, appreciates some well-timed levity.

“I think that it works really well,” he said, “especially with specialists where it’s all eyes on you all the time and everyone knows when you succeed or fail at that position.”

“He keeps it light, which is good because our jobs can be pretty stressful sometimes,” said Paredes. “But when it’s time to work, he works. He’s fit in pretty good with our team here. At the end of the day, we always have a good time.”