Before practice earlier this month at M&T Bank Stadium, Ravens center Jeremy Zuttah was in the team's locker room, his cellphone out. Around him were athletic marvels: massive linemen, rocket-armed quarterbacks, lightning-fast cornerbacks.

Oh, and there was an anthropomorphic flower with a bell-shaped bloom somewhere nearby, too. It was a Bellsprout, Zuttah said, announcing its presence to his teammates.

Fullback Kyle Juszczyk looked across the room. It was as if he'd learned the whereabouts of some uncharted island.

“What?!” he recalled exclaiming. “I ain't never catch anything in the locker room.”

“Juice, you play?” Zuttah asked.

“Yeah! You're talking to a level-20 trainer.”

“Let me see your Pokemon.”

In his retelling, Juszczyk started to crack up. He clarified, rather incredulously, “Like, that happened in an NFL locker room” — and not even so long ago. The memory was hours old; it just happened to be the first one that came to mind from a training camp where the workouts are early, the season-long goals are big, and Pokemon Go is an unexpected but not uncommon conversation piece.

That the augmented-reality game, now reanimating the once-ubiquitous 1990s franchise, has infiltrated the NFL should not be a surprise. Pokemon Go, released weeks before the start of training camps, surpassed 100 million downloads on Google Play last weekend and, according to Apple, broke the App Store record for most first-week downloads ever.

Millennial nostalgia has fueled its rise, a throwback to the quintessential turn-of-the-millennium childhood. Juszczyk was 7 when Pokemon Red Version and Pokemon Blue Version, Nintendo's entrees into its eventual multibillion-dollar enterprise, were released for Game Boy. Most of his teammates, Zuttah included, are 30 or younger; when Pokemania reached the United States in 1998, they were only preteens, by far the game's demographic most likely to catch 'em all.

On class field trips in elementary school, offensive tackle De'Ondre Wesley, 24, said that “you always had your Game Boy playing Pokemon.” Discretion was important, even then, so he played it at the back of the school bus.

Rookie center Anthony Fabiano, 23, collected the trading cards and played the game with friends. At Harvard, he would boot up Pokemon on an emulator — sped up to eight times the normal playing speed — and beat the game on long bus rides.

Even in Canada, defensive end Brent Urban, 25, grew up watching the animated TV show and ruing his luck with the packs of cards he opened. “I didn't have the holographic Charizard, which is what everybody wanted at the time,” the Ontario native said. Instead of Pokemon's version of a franchise quarterback, the best he got was something approximating a punter: a holographic Chansey. “Really nothing great,” Urban said.

And yet their Pokemon passion was but a flame compared with the towering inferno that engulfed Juszczyk. “Pokemon was my entire childhood,” he said, and he began to enumerate all the ways in which he was the very best, like no one ever was.

Juszczyk beat the Game Boy game — probably six times. He caught all 150 of the original Pokemon — and the legendary Mew, the 151st creature, about as rare as a preseason without injuries. He watched the show — then found himself rewatching it on Netflix recently with his nephew, who is 4.

In early July, Pokemon Go was released for iOS and Android smartphones. There was only one thing to do, besides alert childhood friends. “The second I heard about it,” Fabiano said, “I downloaded it.”

Explained Urban: “It kind of gives us '90s babies a little something to connect to.”

More important than that, it has forged unlikely bonds across the team. Offensive lineman Ryan Jensen sounded pleasantly surprised to find that first-round draft pick Ronnie Stanley was “actually pretty big into it,” and Urban said he got the most helpful playing tips from another rookie, fellow defensive end Bronson Kaufusi.

(The day Urban pointed this out, Kaufusi suffered a season-ending ankle injury. Unlike most video games, Pokemon Go encourages walking around; it is not the kind of game best played hobbled.)

Unfortunately for the Ravens' digital critters, when training camp opened last month, the reality of an NFL preseason got in the way of augmented reality. Playing time has decreased as the push for, uh, playing time — the important kind — has intensified.

“We're super busy right now going 12-hour days … so there's not much time to have that kind of fun,” Jensen said. “But it's good, every once in a while, just to get your mind off of football.”

The sociology of Pokemon Go inside the Under Armour Performance Center is difficult to unpack. Urban could not explain why the phenomenon has been isolated mainly to the team's linemen. Nor could Juszczyk, not a lineman in name but still a blocker by occupation.

Guard Marshal Yanda, the graybeard in the team's trenches, is a noted dissenter. He doesn't like Pokemon. He does like teasing teammates who do. Maybe it's a generational thing — Yanda is 31, after all — but he'd rather be fishing. Yes, the allure of video games after a long summer day spent running and thumping and studying is understandable. “But to walk around and be on your phone like a zombie?” he said. “I think it's crazy.”

What is one man's idea of trash might be another's treasured philosophy. During an interview early in training camp, Wesley, a second-year player and second-team right tackle, was careful not to overstate his interest in Pokemon Go. But his enthusiasm peaked at one point during a discussion of the app's gameplay.

Given the option of allying himself with one of three teams, he had chosen Team Mystic and its leader, Blanche.

“It really grasped me, her message,” said Wesley, who started his collegiate career at a community college, went undrafted out of Brigham Young in 2015, was cut by the Ravens late in last preseason, joined the team's practice squad in September and ended up playing in seven games. “She was all about evolving her Pokemon. I was like, ‘OK, I like people progressing.' I like watching my Pokemon progress.”

He smiled. “It's a fun game.”

jshaffer@baltsun.com

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