There were times last season when Stephen Carriere seemed to be living a figure skating version of "Big," one without the wish machine but with a reverse gear. After skating with the juniors all fall, he turned up as the youngest contender in the senior event at the US Championships in Spokane, Wash.
"It was a little weird," the 18-year-old Wakefield native says. "There were a lot of great skaters who'd been to nationals a lot. And all of a sudden I show up." And then, after less than eight minutes of competition, Carriere was back with the kids, winning the world junior title just over a month later.
Now, after a breakout Grand Prix season, he's back with the twentysomethings, and this time he's a contender to make it to the senior world championships in his first shot.
"I don't think it's out of the ballpark," reckons Carriere, who's the best Massachusetts-born male skater since South Chatham's Todd Eldredge, the three-time Olympian who won six US titles and one world title. "I think it's realistic."
Though defending champion Evan Lysacek and three-time titlist Johnny Weir are likely to grab the top two spots at this week's event in St. Paul, third place figures to be a scramble among Carriere, Ryan Bradley, Jeremy Abbott, and Scott Smith, Carriere's clubmate at the Skating Club of Boston.
"It'd be great to be that third position," muses Carriere, who was ninth last time. "It'd be amazing."
It would hardly be unprecedented; Bradley soared from eighth to second last year. But Great Leaps Upward are rarer in the men's ranks than they are in the women's, where 14-year-olds can make the podium, as Caroline Zhang should this week.
"You don't have a lot of newcomers bursting onto the scene as you do in ladies, like when Kimmie Meissner did," Carriere says.
The men tend to arrive later and hang around longer. Both the 23-year-old Weir and the 22-year-old Lysacek will be competing in their eighth senior nationals. Their first was in Boston where Carriere, then a juvenile skater, watched them in awe.
"I was fascinated by them," he recalls. "It's funny, because now I'm competing against them."
Carriere was strictly a sideman to the Lysacek-Weir duet in Spokane, where he skated in front of a packed house for the first time and had a creditable debut, finishing seventh in the free skate.
"To get out there and do that in front of a sold-out crowd, it was a mini-accomplishment," he says.
When Carriere came out of sixth place to win the world junior crown in Germany, the first American victor since Weir, he marked himself as a man on the rise and received invitations to two senior Grand Prix events this season.
"I wasn't really expecting anything," Carriere says. "When I heard I got two right off the bat, I was thrilled."
The Grand Prix events - Skate America and the NHK Trophy in Japan - were his skating graduation presents. He'd already received his diploma from Wakefield High School and been admitted to Boston College. It was time to move on and up, both on the ice and in the classroom.
"Not going to college was never an idea in my head," says Carriere, who's taking two night courses a semester at The Heights. "Skating is temporary and it's going to be gone. I told myself, I'm not going to stop school, even if it takes a little longer. Part-time is perfect at BC."
Juggling full-time high school and his junior-senior skating schedule had been a grind.
"Last year was one of the most stressful years I've ever done," he says. "I had to get applications in, I was taking AP biology, I wanted to go undefeated in juniors."
This year, Carriere spends most of his daytime hours inside the Skating Club's oversized ice house by the Charles. Three 50-minute practice sessions from 10 to 2 with an hour's break, then an hour of off-ice conditioning. Three visits a week for physical therapy with former Olympic ice dancer Peter Breen at his center on the other side of Western Ave. "He keeps my body together," says Carriere. Plus a weekly hour of ballet training.
That's what it will take for Carriere to make the team for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. His cousin Caroline Hallisey ("I think she's somehow connected to my grandmother on my dad's side"), a short-track speedskater from Natick, made three Olympic teams and Carriere is hoping for two.
"We started looking at the Olympics probably six years ago," says Mark Mitchell, the former US medalist who along with Peter Johansson has coached Carriere since he was 11. "It's been a long-range plan, and right now he's on target."
Each year, the bar goes up a notch. Each year, the programs become more technically demanding, more artistically sophisticated. Carriere's long program is tougher now, with a second triple axel. Next will come a quadruple jump, the essential ante to win a global medal.
His choreography, his music, also are evolving; he skates the short to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," the long to "Hollywood Nocturne," a Forties-style zoot-suited number ("Dressed in style so cool and refined/Stands a man from some other time").
"Getting out of that 'junior' description," Carriere says.
This season has been about growth and polish.
"The goal is for him to feel like he belongs in seniors," says Mitchell.
So the Grand Prix circuit, against the world's top skaters, was a natural proving ground. For the first time, Carriere's coaches asked him where he hoped to place.
"I was shocked, because they usually focus on the performance," he says. "They said, just be honest. I said, 'Well, I'd like to be in the top five.' "
Carriere finished fourth at Skate America (ahead of Bradley) and third at NHK (ahead of Abbott) and ended up as first alternate for the six-man field for last month's Grand Prix final in Turin, putting himself third behind Weir and Lysacek in the pecking order among Americans.
The Grand Prix was Carriere's first taste of skating's big stage.
"Having cameras following you around," he says. "Going out on the ice and seeing every seat filled. I have that behind me now."
Up ahead, two years off, is Olympus. Carriere will be 20 then, the same age Eldredge was when he competed in his first Games in 1992. Between now and then, he says, it's all about expanding upward and outward.
"My skating is like a tree," Carriere figures. "I just want to keep adding branches."
John Powers can be reached as jpowers@globe.com
