Tianna Hicks called them “the two blocks of hell.” That’s what separated the family’s low-income, second-floor apartment and the place where her son, Najee Harris, was making a better life for himself on late nights in the summer of 2015

Drug dealers. Gang bangers. Lost souls given way to temptation. They were among the nocturnal crowd that gathered around the little plaza on the corner of Sycamore Drive and L Street, a neighborhood hive of criminal enterprise about 300 yards from Antioch High School, where Harris was the football team’s burgeoning star.

“I was terrified at first because he’s walking at night to go up to the (school’s) football field to work out,” Tianna, a single mother of five kids, told DK Pittsburgh Sports. “The first week I was there, someone was killed on the side of our apartment building. I didn’t know if he got shot there, but when I woke up there was yellow police tape and a dead man’s body on the side of our apartment.”

Renting a place in the most dangerous neighborhood in Antioch, a bedroom community 37 miles east of Oakland, was all Tianna could afford on her medical assistant’s salary. But it represented a modest bit of upward mobility for a family that had endured a string of evictions and spells of homelessness. Most importantly to her youngest child, it was within walking distance of the new football stadium, where Harris could improve his agility and conditioning using cones, bands and bungee cords at 10 p.m., a time of day when the withering heat had abated.

Sometimes, Harris trained in the dark. Sometimes, football coach John Lucido turned on a bank of lights when he knew his gifted tailback was coming.

“What a lot of people didn’t realize at the time was this was Najee’s getaway from everything that was going on in his life,” personal trainer Marcus Malu said. “A lot of people find that escape in the bottle or in drugs, some kind of addiction to fill that void. For him, it was working out.”

The only shortcut Harris, the Steelers’ first-round draft pick, took on his road to the NFL was ducking behind the Sycamore Square plaza to avoid contact with trouble and chaos. He trotted a well-worn course across railroad tracks, down a grassy embankment and onto an asphalt pathway that led him to safety and West 18th Street, where Eells Stadium awaited.

Last week during an introductory news conference in Pittsburgh, Harris shouted out all the coaches, teachers, school administrators, shelter workers, friends and family members scattered throughout Northern California who had helped him on his journey.

“It takes a village to raise a child, and I believe that is what happened,” Harris said.

In leading Antioch High to gridiron glory and emerging as one of the nation’s top college recruits, Harris discovered some unlikely allies along the way. Neighborhood gang leaders began pulling him aside to promise him he would never be harmed in pursuit of his dream.

“There’s almost a too-good-to-be-true element to Najee’s story,” Malu said. “That’s usually a good-versus-evil story, right? What you had here was evil and good teaming up to make sure nothing bad happened to this kid. When Najee started to bring that light to Antioch, it put a lot of things on pause. A lot of people really enjoyed what was going on with him and that football team. The games were packed. It was a great time for Antioch. It didn’t matter if you were Black, White, Latino, Tongan, Samoan, you were rooting for the kid because he represented all of us in the struggle.”

“Just drop me off here, this is good.”

That’s what Harris told Lucido when the coach started squiring him from football practices in September of 2013, a few days after the freshman had enrolled at Antioch High. At the time, Harris was living in a different part of town.

It was common for the veteran coach to deliver a handful of his most at-risk kids to their homes, but Lucido’s suspicions were raised when Harris kept asking him to be left at a fast-food restaurant rather than a house or apartment. The coach knew almost nothing about his newest freshman other than he showed great promise and he hid his face behind his dreadlocks, often avoiding eye contact.

This is how Harris operated in the years before becoming the gregarious player that football fans recognize today. He would only let adults go so far with him. It was the defense mechanism of a private kid who had walled off the outside world to his family’s hardships.

“Finally, I said, ‘Najee, I can’t keep dropping you off here, I’m responsible for you,’” Lucido recalled. “That’s when he told me he and his family were staying at Motel 6.”

Five kids and two parents holed up in a single room, living day to day, never sure when the money would run out.

Antioch High faculty members scrambled to find them a more suitable residence. Principal Louie Rocha learned the father, Curt Harris, who had been in and out of the family’s orbit for nearly 20 years, worked in construction. Through his connections with the county, Rocha got the dad a job on the crew building the new football stadium.

Curt never showed. Instead, he went back to his native Seattle, leaving Hicks and the kids to fend for themselves.

Over time, teachers and coaches stitched together strands of the fractured family history: the neglect and abuse suffered by Tianna at the hands of Curt, who had briefly played football at Grambling University before reportedly chasing fast money in the streets and taking the kind of shortcuts his youngest son detested.

Rocha didn’t know any of this when Harris walked into the principal’s office for the first time. He had no idea about the nights spent in vans when Tianna couldn’t find anywhere else to shelter her kids. He had no clue this tall, skinny freshman would soon have Nick Saban, Jim Harbaugh, Brian Kelly and other major-college coaches visiting the school with scholarship offers at the ready. Rocha just saw a youngster in need of support.

The principal possesses an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Antioch (population: 111,200). His family relocated here in 1968 when it was still a rural community, and its only industries were paper mills, steel mills and refineries scattered along the banks of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta. Rocha watched it grow into the second largest city in Contra Costa County, where the golden-brown rolling foothills look ripped from the opening credits of M*A*S*H.

As Antioch swelled with commuters searching for relief from soaring Bay Area housing prices, it began to face the same challenges of many urban areas. In 2007, Rocha had a 10-foot-high chain-link fence built around the campus after a student was beaten by an adult in an adjacent neighborhood. None of the 2,100 students are permitted to leave the school unaccompanied for lunch.

Tuesday, the principal gave a visitor a guided tour of the city, which recently gained a stop on the Bay Area Rapid Transit line and has adopted the motto: Opportunity Lives Here. He also drove around the Sycamore apartments and plaza, where cops cars were frequently spotted circling the blocks.

“It can be an intimidating place, especially after dark,” the principal said

Rocha took an immediate liking to Harris, who expressed an interest in playing football. The principal figured the freshman team was a good place to start.

Harris’ career with his fellow ninth-graders lasted about 15 seconds.

“We are down at the track and walking back to the locker room and here comes Najee,” Antioch varsity offensive coordinator Brett Dudley recalled. “Our freshmen coach takes one look at him and says, ‘no way, he’s going up to jayvee.’ It was equal parts ‘Najee is gonna kill one of my freshmen’ and ‘don’t even get my hopes up because he’s going to rush for 200 yards in the first game and you guys are going to pull him up anyway.’”

On the afternoon of Harris’ JV debut, Rocha and the varsity coaches arrived at halftime and were surprised to see him sitting on the bench, helmet removed.

“I walked over to our JV coach and said, ‘Nick, I came down to see the new kid play,” the principal said. “The coach looks at me says, ‘Mr. Rocha, the score is 28-0. Najee got the ball four times and he scored all four times.’”

GETTYNajee Harris and his mother Tianna Hicks.

It didn’t take Antioch football fans long to fall in love with their swift and powerful running back, who would finish his career with 7,984 yards rushing. Harris helped the Panthers reach the playoffs for the first time in years as a sophomore despite the fact the team didn’t play a single home game because of stadium renovations.

He could run around and over opposition, but what really thrilled his growing legion of followers was his penchant for hurdling defenders.

“It’s pretty when you see it,” Tianna said laughing. “If it wasn’t my son, I’d be like ‘dang.’ But oh my God, if this boy gets caught in the air, he’s going to helicopter spin across the field and I’m going to be running down there. Then, you’ll see where the real hurdler in the family comes from.”

Harris wasn’t the first in the family to dream big. His mother had Olympic aspirations as a long-legged teenage track-and-field standout in Oakland. She was a decorated high jumper, long jumper and triple jumper, who also ran the anchor leg on her prep team’s mile relay.

But academic failings held her back from graduating by age 18, and Tianna’s life soon swerved left of center. She met Curt Harris and the couple produced five kids in a six-year span. Malachi. Jahmila. Curtis III. Fela. Najee.

Relations became strained and money tight. The family lived a nomadic existence all over Northern California and Seattle. Tianna recalled spending several Christmas holidays in homeless shelters. Even as the father repeatedly abandoned the family, the mother kept the children together.

“Tianna is quiet strong, just like Najee,” Malu said. “She is a day-to-day warrior, a rock for those kids.”

Occasionally, finances were so bleak and options so limited that Tianna and the kids spent nights in their vehicle. Mom usually could persuade the older children to stay with friends, but not her youngest.

“Najee wouldn’t do it,” Tianna said. “I thought I was offering him the best thing — go spend a night at a friend’s house and play video games — but he was like, ‘if my mom is sleeping in a car, I’m sleeping in a car.’ When Najee says he’s from ‘everywhere,’ he’s not lying because we were.”

Although Tianna didn’t enjoy her time in Seattle, she got her family much-needed transitional support. She also served as a role model for the importance of continuing education, no matter what the age. Tianna returned to the classroom, earning her GED and medical assistant training certificate.

“We were all going to school at the same time — me and my kids,”she said.

Tianna found work with Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest employers in Antioch. By then, the child she had nicknamed “Little Buddy” had long outgrown anger issues that saw him annoying teachers, destroying kindergarten classrooms and picking fights with other kids.

Football provided Harris with an outlet to channel his aggressions and Tianna with the carrot to dangle any time his grades or comportment slipped.

“We never had a behavioral issues with him,” Lucido said. “We just had trouble getting him to say a sentence. He didn’t like to talk his first few years in high school.”

That was about to change.

Coaches began hiding Harris’ helmet and shoulder pads during his junior season. It wasn’t meant as a means of punishment, but of preservation.

Harris rushed for 2,744 yards and 36 touchdowns in guiding the Panthers to an undefeated regular season. He also was a two-point conversion phenom, deployed as a Wildcat formation quarterback. (Mike Tomlin and Matt Canada might want to squirrel away that nugget.)

That was hardly the extent of Harris’ workload, however. He trained with Malu before and after practices. Malu tells stories of how instructor and pupil would sneak into an abandoned gym for 4 a.m. sessions before he opened his own fitness center.

The coaches appreciated Harris’ sculpted physique and his relentless desire to train, but they begged him to take the occasional day off from practice.

“Najee doesn’t think he’s that good,” said Lucido, whose school has produced 10 NFL players, including Hall-of-Famer Gino Marchetti. “He’ll tell you, ‘I’m an OK running back.’ On the day he was drafted last week, Najee was down at Malu’s gym early in the morning not wanting to skip a workout. The day of the draft!