Before he and partner Tommy Heinsohn became the longest running broadcast team in NBA history.

Before he became a virtual New England institution as the TV voice of the Celtics.

Before he comes into our living rooms every winter for 82 games.

Long before.

It was back there somewhere in the late ’70s and he was the sportscaster at Channel 12 then, a recognizable figure in the Rhode Island sports scene. Before that, he even once had been Salty Brine’s sidekick on WPRO for awhile, and what was more Rhode Island than that?

But even then he wanted to do play-by-play, and I remember him doing URI basketball one year, when the team was lousy, and during garbage time of bad games he would sometimes use his friends’ names for the scrubs of other teams.

Not surprising.

He had grown up in Dorchester, an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Boston then, had played high school basketball, and was planning to be a teacher, until the Vietnam War got in the way. He enlisted in the Navy, ended up flying planes, mostly in Spain and Portugal, but he had hated the Navy so much that when he finally got out he promised himself he was going to do something he liked.

Like sports.

“I was a marginal athlete,” he once said, “but I was always looking for a way to stay close to it, to be a part of it.”

The first stop was an all-night radio station in New Bedford where he was an all-night disc jockey. It was there that he and a co-worker talked the station into covering a local golf tournament for an entire afternoon. The only problem? Their only equipment was a phone in the clubhouse.

“We’d say things like here we are on the 14th fairway,” he once said. “We just made it up. But no graduate school with the finest equipment could have given you that kind of experience.”

But by 1985 he knew he didn’t want to spend the rest of his working life sitting in a studio reading sports scores into a camera. He had been doing home games for the Celtics for four years then, and knew that was where his heart was. He also knew the TV sports news business was changing. More feature oriented. More visuals. More gimmicks. More tape of off-beat stories designed to attract the fleeting interest of the non-sports fan.

“They want you to ride elephants now,” he said then,

But Gorman didn’t want to ride elephants.

He wanted to broadcast games.

His first real start was in 1980 when he did seven Providence College games on television for WPRO. The nest year he began doing some Celtics games on Prism, which evolved into SportsChannel. Then it was a halftime show on the Big East game of the week. Every year a little more progress.

By the mid ’80s he was in his late 30s, had an 18-month-old daughter, and he was done with Channel 12, casting his fate to the fickle winds of play-by-play broadcasting. He would do things like seven games in nine days, all over the East, flying in little planes into Syracuse in a snowstorm one day, then out in the next morning for somewhere else. Chasing the games wherever they took him. Life on the road.

“Doing play-by-play is the realization of a fantasy,” he said then. “You get great seats at great ballgames and it’s as close as you can get to being an athlete without being one.”

It’s still the same.

But its’ not always been a great seat at a great game. He’s had innumerable years when he’s been on one year contracts. He’s had different owners and different management teams, the corporate turmoil over the past 30 years. There’s never been any tenure, never been any union protection, never anyone giving him a medical plan, never been a whole lot of job security.

Have microphone, will travel.

So how has he managed to both survive and flourish doing the Celtics for so long? What’s the secret?

“I’ve always tried to not to get in the way of the game,” he says.

Bingo.

For that’s Gorman’s appeal as a broadcaster. He’s never had a shtick, never been bigger than life, never had one of those on-air styles that overwhelm the game. He’s always been the consummate pro, someone who not only knows the nuances of the game, but also someone whose casual style doesn’t make you run for the mute button.

“I worked for years with Bill Raftery and Tommy, two guys with big personalities, two guys who are entertainers at some level, and I’ve never minded being the straight man,” he says. “That’s my niche.”

When he first made the decision to give up the security of Channel 12 to go off on this brave new adventure, the dream was to one day work the Final Four, to be the voice you heard when they threw the ball up.

Now?

“I have middle-aged people coming up to me saying that they grew up listening to me,” he says. “It’s crazy. The voice of the Celtics. How good is that? It’s everything I once could have wished for.”

For he knows there were never any guarantees when he first set out to chase a dream, knows that it was a long ride from the Dorchester of his youth to being the voice of the Celtics. Knows that only the fortunate few get a chance hold their dream in the palm of their hand 82 nights a year.