“He would come to the games that didn’t really matter,” Chambers said. “Like at 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock in the morning. He was there, the only one there, just sitting there reading his newspaper and watching the games.

“Sometimes I was there, like, ‘Wow, why are you here? Like, I kind of don’t even want to be here right now.’ ”

Amaker made it a point to be at all of Chambers’s games. Sometimes the games would be crack-of-dawn early, and since Chambers grew up in Golden Valley, Minn., most times it was see-your-own-breath cold.

But for Amaker, there wasn’t anything more important. He had been watching Chambers since he was an eighth-grader. It started with the six degrees of serendipity that come with college recruiting.

Amaker originally traveled to Minnesota five years ago with his eye on two guards. One was Trent Lockett. The other was Raymond Cowels. But the player who caught his eye was Chambers, who couldn’t have been more than 5 feet, 5 or 6 inches. Even though he was young, Chambers was already playing varsity basketball.

“He was precise,” Amaker said. “He took pride in what he did.”

After that, Amaker kept coming back. Chambers’s basketball schedule essentially became his own. It didn’t matter where the game was or what time. Chambers would look up and see Amaker in the bleachers.

“More than any other coach, he was there,” said Chambers. “That also showed that he really cared about me and he cared about my game and how I was as a person. He’d be there early, maybe two or three games before my game, just to make sure he was there for my game.”

Amaker called after almost every one. If not that day, then within the week. He wanted Chambers at Harvard, but he wasn’t just making a sales pitch or stroking a young player’s ego.

“He was a person that kept it real,” Chambers said. “He said, ‘You’ve got to work on this and you’ve got to work on this.’ Even though he wasn’t my coach at the time, he was still hard on me and he didn’t really care how I took it. He just wanted me to become a better person and a better player.”

Lockett wound up at Marquette (by way of Arizona State), Cowels at Santa Clara. But Chambers, as a freshman, has become the jewel of a 17-7 Crimson team trying to win the Ivy League for a third straight season.

Averaging 13.0 points and 5.9 assists, he is a candidate for the Bob Cousy Award as the nation’s top point guard, but moreover, he is Amaker’s brain on the court, largely because of a relationship forged long before he ever got to Harvard.

Between Chambers’s junior and senior years, he and his family took an unofficial trip to Boston and made stops at as many schools as possible: Boston University, Boston College, Providence, and Harvard.

Before they left Harvard, Crimson assistant Brian DeStefano stopped Chambers’s mother, Elice, and said, “Wow, Siyani really, really reminds Coach Amaker of himself when he was young, when he was playing. You need to check him out. Go Google him.”

So they did. It was uncanny.

Amaker wore No. 4, the same number Chambers wore in high school. Their mannerisms were the same, their style of play was the same.

“Siyani was like, ‘Wow,’ ” Elice said. “I was just sitting there like, ‘Oooh, this is kind of scary.’ ”

She didn’t know it at the time, but Siyani texted his younger brother, Kamali, back in Minnesota and told him to check out the video.

“I think at that moment is when Siyani made his decision,” Elice said. “He didn’t make it public, but his brother knew.”

Some 30 years ago, there was a point guard creating a loud buzz in northern Virginia. It was loud enough that Celtics patriarch Red Auerbach took notice. The way the story goes, Auerbach said this point guard was the best he’d seen in 10 years.

But the buzz only carried so far.

When Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski came up from Durham, N.C., to mine a Washington summer league for talent, he was looking for Johnny Dawkins. He had to be persuaded to give another player, a point guard, a look. When he did, he knew that was the kind of player he wanted.

That point guard was Tommy Amaker.

He wasn’t big, by any means, just 6 feet, 150 pounds. But he was talented.