You don’t get much farther from the dream than this. Let’s start with that immutable truth.

Let’s start on a February morning, any February morning, cold and gray and drained of color. Inside the ASH Centre, the field lies in half-gloom. Most of the lights are off, and so the seniors shuffling around its perimeter drift along like pleasant ghosts, smiling and nodding at you as they pass.

And in the middle?

In the middle are the man and his coach and the dream, the one that seems as far away as the moon until they both start talking.

The man is Mikese Morse, 24, a Tampa, Fla., native who’s finishing his degree in business administration at IPFW, mostly so he can work with his coach, Eric McCarrol. McCarrol, a Wayne graduate and longtime track and field coach, was Morse’s coach at South Florida a few years back. He coached him when Morse, a long jumper, reached the NCAA regional in 2007 and when he won the Big East title the next year and when he placed 12th at the Olympic trials in 2008.

Then McCarrol moved back to Fort Wayne. And Morse subsequently dropped out of the sport for a year-and-a-half.

Now here they are, just the two of them, trying to make it to the Olympics.

“We’re kind of the Cinderella story,” McCarrol says.

Quite a mouthful there.

Most Olympic hopefuls are backed by corporate money and have entire staffs of well-paid coaches chronicling their every move. Morse and McCarrol have only each other. McCarrol is all the staff there is, and he’s living off his savings to do this. “This is the grass-roots thing going on,” he says.

As for Morse … well, start with the fact he didn’t run track until his junior year in high school, and then it was just to improve his basketball skills. But in the state regionals that year – he was living in Shaker Heights, Ohio – he bounded a foot-and-a-half farther than he ever had and suddenly had the second-best jump in the state.

“So then I said, ‘OK, maybe I could be pretty good at this,’ ” Morse says.

Three years later, he was at the Olympic trials. Five months ago, having stayed in contact with McCarrol, he showed up on his old coach’s doorstep two days early, ready to begin training for London.

“That said a whole lot,” McCarrol says. “I’ve had a lot of athletes that wanted to try to go to the next level, and 90 percent of the time they don’t follow up. And this guy showed up two days early.”

The training has been going well, abetted by the kindness of strangers. Brad and Caleb Kimmel opened the ASH Centre, 1701 Freeman St., to them during the senior walking program. South Side High School let them use its long-jump pit, and so has IPFW.

Morse has eagerly taken advantage of the largesse. He can, after all, use the work.

“I’m still developing now, and I’m just getting to the place now where I feel comfortable with the sport,” Morse says. “(In 2008), sometimes you’d get next to guys and see they’d won medals in the Olympics and stuff, and it was kind of a little intimidating. I was kind of questioning maybe did I belong, did I fit, could I really do this.”

He thinks he can now, despite the odds. So does McCarrol, who sees in Morris something his own younger, striving self.

“What makes him a perfect fit for the community is he believes in the small guy,” McCarrol says. “He believes that a guy like him can actually make it to the Olympics.

“We’re realistic. We realize it may not happen. But if you’ve got the talent and you’ve got the coach that’s going to help you and you’ve got the community that’s going to help you and you’ve got your parents that are behind you, why not give it a shot?”