COLLEGE PARK - Matt Crawford's final college football experience will come a week from today in Atlanta, when Maryland plays Tennessee in the Peach Bowl.

But for the senior right offensive tackle, the major event might have been Sunday, which was the last time he could wind down in Maryland's Gossett Team House after a practice. The locker room is where players sit around, shooting the breeze, seeing who's going out for dinner.

"It's not going to be hard leaving football," Crawford said. "It's going to be leaving the team, all the bonds you had, being with the fellas.

"You see the same guys every day. It's a family. It's a great thing when you walk in and all your friends are here."

Much has come to the Moravia, N.Y., native in his time at Maryland. A four-year starter, he was an anchor on a 2001 team that won the Atlantic Coast Conference championship and went to the Orange Bowl. Despite earning his degree in criminology and criminal justice in May, he returned for his final season and earned first-team all-conference honors this fall.

"I'll take a lot of Matt Crawfords around here," said offensive line coach Tom Brattan.

However, the mere membership in the fraternity of football here may have been pull enough for Crawford. Even on losing squads at Maryland when he was recruited in the late 1990s, the sense of family pulled him to College Park and not to alternative suitors Michigan State and Mississippi.

That same feeling kept him playing after a severe injury to his left knee during his sophomore season in 2000, suffered in a practice with only two games left on the schedule. It followed a run of 20 straight starts during which he was named to the freshman All-America squad the year before. The injury left him uncertain about his future with the Terps.

"When I saw it, you could tell from his face that he thought his career was over," said fellow lineman Eric Dumas.

On a body as large as Crawford's - 6 feet 6, 313 pounds - recovery wasn't a given. He had seen hip and ankle injuries pop up as the aftershocks of reconstructive knee surgery.

And yet, remembering the fellas, he was rehabbing two hours a day after early-morning weightlifting sessions.

"There's always a time when I questioned whether my knee would hold up," Crawford said. "But I couldn't leave these guys. They're my brothers."

Crawford had been working with the school's trainers for a month before he started to see results - he began to try running, and his range of motion returned, as did the strength in his knee.

By the time summer 2001 came around, he was with the team for its semi-formal workouts. His first day back with the team thrilled him as much as the Terps' ACC championship months later.

"I was able to run - the little things," Crawford said. "You take it for granted, but when you're having to do your own bike workout, you're not running with them. Winning the ACC was a contender, but coming back was a great day in my life."

Despite "pain you can't describe unless you go through it," Crawford started in each game during the 2001 season, winning the league's Brian Piccolo Award as the ACC's most courageous player.

The pain subsided only after he underwent surgery in January to clean what he described "a lot of junk in my knee."

Playing 10 of 11 games, Crawford received the best coaches' grades among Maryland's offensive linemen, a testament, Brattan said, to Crawford's preparation.

His readiness sometimes even leads to disappointment. Take the case of his final regular-season game against Wake Forest and his probable assignment, All-ACC tackle Calvin Pace. Pace had suffered a leg injury the previous week that made his participation unlikely, yet Crawford did not know and spent the week studying Pace's moves in anticipation of the challenge. When he saw Pace wasn't going to play, he went to Brattan and asked the coach if he had known all along.

"I just smiled at him, and he said, 'I can't believe you did that,' " Brattan said. "But that's been his trademark. That's a guy who has taken that to heart."

Next for Terps

Matchup: No. 20 Maryland (10-3) vs. Tennessee (8-4) in Peach Bowl

Site: Georgia Dome, Atlanta

When: Dec. 31, 7:30 p.m.

TV/Radio: ESPN/WBAL (1090 AM)

Line: Pick 'em