Boise State’s Johnson tells the rest of fairy-tale finish

The story that has captivated the college football bowl season has moved from Ian Johnson’s bended knee to the bright lights of New York City to the warmth of hearth and home and the dimmer lights of San Dimas.

All in five days.

If you didn’t see it when it happened, you probably have seen a replay by now. Fox Sports is showing it under the heading “Instant Classic.” Turns out, that’s right.

This story is “Hoosiers” without any Hollywood tinkering, “Rudy” with a better ending. What Boise State’s Johnson did on the Fiesta Bowl football field, and along the sideline afterward, makes grandmas and truck drivers tear up.

In summary, Johnson, a sophomore running back, scored the winning two points in overtime against Oklahoma on New Year’s night, taking a handoff on a Statue of Liberty play that saw its heyday in the Red Grange era and had poor Oklahoma so fooled that several Sooners are still wandering around Phoenix, looking for the ball.

Immediately afterward, at the end of a national TV interview, he turned to his girlfriend, Boise state cheerleader Chrissy Popadics, and proposed marriage. Millions were watching, still in disbelief about the game. And then this!

Sideline reporter Chris Myers, who was as breathless as anybody who had seen the game decided by three plays that kids draw in the huddle on sandlots, properly reflected the sentiment of most viewers when he sent it back to the booth:

“I don’t have anything else to say,” Myers said.

But there is more, and five days later it was said.

On Friday, in the afternoon quiet of a restaurant not far from the San Dimas Canyon residence he has called home most of his life and the La Verne Damien High football field where he earned a scholarship from Boise State -- his only offer -- Johnson sat alongside his fiancee, took a deep breath and tried to get his mind around all that has happened this week.

He talked about how close he came to being the goat rather than the hero.

Two plays before his winning run, he had fumbled and Oklahoma recovered. Field officials ruled that his knee hit the ground before the ball came out, but the play was reviewed and had the ruling been overturned the game would have been over.

“I was hurting while we waited,” Johnson said. “When you are trying to make yards, you keep scrambling, digging. I didn’t know when my knee hit the ground. Quite frankly, until I saw it, I thought I fumbled.”

Given new life, Boise State got to within one point, with a touchdown pass from a receiver who had lined up at quarterback, then decided to go for the win with a two-point conversion rather than tying with the high-percentage extra point and starting a second overtime with Oklahoma.

“I think our coaches figured we were pretty beaten down. I know I was,” Johnson said. “A lot of it was the pass-blocking. Their linemen were huge. I kept trying to cut block them. Then they’d blitz their defensive backs and they were all bigger than me too.”

So Coach Chris Petersen -- at the urging of backup quarterbacks Bush Hamdan and Nick Lomax, son of former NFL quarterback Neil Lomax -- called for the Statue of Liberty play.

“We just call it ‘Statue,’ ” Johnson said. “We practiced it a lot but only used it one other time during the season, a big-gainer against Idaho.

“I decided to do something different this time. I watch when teams run these side screens, like we were faking, and the running back usually takes the play off. So instead of taking a couple of steps to the right and then going back left to get the ball from the quarterback, I just kind of hung out behind him for a few counts before I took off.”

Johnson said the first thing he saw when he got the ball was three big Sooners linemen. The next thing he saw was that they were all blocked and the lane to the end zone, and immediate fame, was unimpeded.

He crossed the goal line, turned left, and headed for the stands, tossing the game ball in the direction of where he knew his father, Sterling, was sitting.

“I overthrew him by 20 rows,” Johnson said. “That’s why they didn’t have me try the halfback pass on the play before.

“I’m not really the kind of guy to do that sort of thing, to showboat. But I always told my dad, if I ever know he is close and I have a game-winning TD, I’ll throw it to him. Well, this was a game-winner, a perfect-season ender, a Fiesta Bowl title, it was everything. So I had to do it.”

Johnson had 54 friends and relatives at the game, most in that section near the end zone. Many of them swarmed toward him to celebrate and the sideline barrier collapsed on his shin. He is still limping.

Soon, Myers was grabbing him for the postgame interview. He told Johnson that they’d be on national TV in five seconds. In that time, an idea planted by Fiesta Bowl official Tyler Hanson, whom Johnson had told about his plan to propose to Chrissy, kicked in. Score the winning touchdown and do it then, Hanson had advised.

Johnson decided that a winning two-point conversion would suffice. He told Myers of his plan just before they went on the air.

In the melee that ensued after Johnson crossed the goal line, Popadics lost track of her boyfriend. Across the field, she got up on the bench to try to spot him, did so, and took off running, arriving at his side just before he was to go on with Myers.

She did not hear Johnson tell Myers what he was going to do, so when Myers ended the interview by saying, “And now, you can propose to your girlfriend,” she was caught off guard.

Sterling Johnson and his wife, Colleen, saw it on the stadium Jumbotron. Chrissy’s parents, Mark and Barbara Popadics of Boise, saw it at home on TV.

“I was in shock,” Chrissy recalled.

Johnson had the ring in his hotel room. He designed it himself -- “2.3 total carat weight,” he says proudly -- and when the couple finally got back and he could open the box and show it to her, she was in shock again. (And then he went into shock when it didn’t fit, a situation fixed the next day at a Phoenix jeweler.)

Soon, the TV networks began calling. After making sure no NCAA rules would be violated, Johnson, Popadics and school official Max Corbet were on a plane to New York. They did everything from “Good Morning America” to CNN to “Cold Pizza,” where Johnson actually ate some cold pizza and got sick. They returned Thursday night and have a couple of weeks to wind down and find some peace and quiet before returning to school.

Relaxing might not be so easy. Chrissy’s parents had to add caller-ID to their phone and Johnson had to slowly work his way out of the restaurant Friday, through some cellphone photography and autograph signing. San Dimas may be quiet, but it knows its local heroes.

Johnson’s original plan was to propose this week at Laguna Beach. The couple met on a beach in Hawaii two years ago, after a Boise State game. Each was with several friends, and neither had any idea who the other was or what they did.

“They wear helmets,” Chrissy recalled. “I didn’t know him. All I know was that he was the cutest thing I ever saw.”

At Laguna, “We have a special place, kind of between big boulders, where the surf comes right in on the rocks,” Johnson said. “I was going to ropose there. I thought I had found the perfect place.

“Turns out I was wrong.”

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. For previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.