The Braylon Edwards story continues, and gets only bette, more interesting and just plain cool.

The former Browns wide receiver — he played with them for four-plus years after they selected him at No. 3 overall in the 2005 NFL Draft out of Michigan — is being hailed as a hero after recently saving the life of an 80-year-old man who was about to have his head slammed face-first to the floor by a 20-year-old man during a fight at a YMCA in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills. Now 41, Edwards stepped in and wrestled the younger man to the floor. The younger man then fled but was later apprehended by police.

I wrote in this space that an untold and unknown part of the story was that Edwards wasn’t like this at all when he played for the Browns. Like a lot of young guys, especially those such as Edwards who come into a lot of money, he was immature, irresponsible and selfish.

Remembering that, and then fast- forwarding to a decade and a half later to his heroic acts, it’s apparent that Edwards has come a long way and turned into a model citizen and a contributing member of society.

People can mature and change, and Edwards certainly has.

What a good story, an excellent addendum, really, to his saving that man.

But now I find out that the change in Edwards likely started a long time before anyone — perhaps even Edwards himself and those in his circle — could have imagined.

My friend, Steve Doerschuk, the longtime outstanding sportswriter for the Canton Repository who was the paper’s beat writer covering the Browns for two decades, recounted an interesting story from when Edwards was playing for the Browns.

“One time I asked Edwards to reach out to a kid with leukemia. His father had asked me to do so,” Steve said. “Edwards reached out. That was when I thought he was a meathead.”

Taking a page out of his faith, he added, “It reminds me that Jesus invited us to remove the plank in our own eye before criticizing the speck in someone else’s eye.”

As it turns out, a lot of us back then — those covering the Browns and otherwise — had really big planks in our eyes when it came to Braylon Edwards.

Steve King