Let’s start this here, at 3:15 on the first day of school, with the girls spread around the rain-starved grass and the soccer balls rolling and this guy here, Brian Booker, talking about the day Claire Duncan scared the absolute bejeezus out of him.

It was a day much like this one, early in the season, and they were doing some running, these Northrop girls. And Duncan, No. 24 over there, suddenly stopped.

“I need to sit down,” she said.

“Oh, gosh,” Booker said, or perhaps something stronger.

And then Duncan said this: “My ankle hurts.”

No such pronouncement ever caused a soccer coach quite so much relief.

Because here’s what you need to know about No. 24 over there, doing her stretching like everyone else before another ordinary day of practice: She ain’t ordinary. In fact, Booker’s never run across anyone quite like her in all the years he’s coached.

Claire Duncan, you see, has a pacemaker in her chest.

She’s had it for three years, since she was 13, not long after the day she was getting her wisdom teeth extracted and they couldn’t put her all the way under because something was screwy with her EKG. One thing led to another, and pretty soon the diagnosis came down: She had complete heart block, a condition in which the top two chambers of her heart don’t send the proper signals to the bottom two.

“And so the heartbeat is really irregular,” she says now, as if describing a case of the sniffles. “Mine was 42 beats a minute at rest. It’s supposed to be, like, 73.”

And maybe that qualified her as a medical miracle of sorts, because she’d been playing soccer since she was 4 years old. She loved it like no kid ever loved anything, even though, when she was playing, she’d get tired and short of breath more quickly than she should have. But she figured that was just how she was, and kept playing.

It wasn’t just how she was. Or maybe it was, because when they told her she needed a pacemaker, the keep-playing part of her compelled her to ask only one question.

“Can I still play soccer?” she said, right off.

“I wasn’t really worried about anything else,” says Duncan, who, true to form, scheduled the surgery around soccer season. “I wanted to play. That was my passion and still is. That’s what I want to do.”

There’s a lot of stuff she can’t do now, of course. She can’t rock climb. She can’t do heavy weightlifting above her head. She can’t go through metal detectors, talk with her cellphone pressed to her left ear, carry her iPod in her shirt pocket, or ride roller coasters, because they use magnets to stop them and she can’t be around magnets.

“But I don’t really like roller coasters, so it’s fine,” Duncan says.

What she does like is soccer, of course, and how the pacemaker has been, in a very real sense, not a hindrance to that but a liberation. Before she was diagnosed, she was playing for her dad, and every so often her eyes would glaze over and he’d make her stop. And she hated that. She never wanted to stop, not ever.

Now, however …

Well. Now, three years later, she plays varsity soccer as a junior at Northrop, and she can walk up stairs and run and play her game without getting winded. And at Jefferson Middle School, where she was going when the pacemaker was put in, there’s an award named after her. And every so often, she thinks about all the times she got short of breath and dizzy and her eyes would glaze over, and feels lucky to be alive.

“I was talking to someone else I had met, I don’t remember where, and she was telling me she had started passing out a lot, and come to find out it was her heart,” Duncan says. “And she had to get a pacemaker and a defibrillator. And I thanked God not to have anything like that happen to me, and that he gave me this opportunity.”

To live. To play. To shake a visitor’s hand and head back out onto the rain-starved grass, where the soccer balls await.