December 25th, 1998. It's Christmas night and you strain your head and peer across the drenched runway at the shimmering, fast fading airport lights and then Ireland is gone. You're zipping back towards Phily and shrill whistles and those smiling, pristine American college crowds and pre-dawn starts and malls and sodas and cities you had scarcely heard of and before you close your eyes, you think the same thought as the night when you were first leaving for St Joseph's: Things won't be the same anymore. Seven hours later and you're back on the hard-wood, hitting jumpshots.

Susan Moran is a basketball player, a freshman starter for the St Joseph's Hawks in Philadelphia. Oh, she is other things as well - an 18-year-old from Tullamore, a marketing student, a lover of sleep (when possible), a hotshot on the tennis court, a Michael Jordan fan - but she is, primarily, a hoops player. She realised that the first time she suited up for her new college in November.

"We travelled to Tennessee, you know, the defending three-time national champions. We ran out and there were 17,000 people in the arena, just going crazy. They wouldn't sit until the ball was thrown in. It was the strangest thing for me. I felt like I was a professional athlete."

The home side ran riot with Tamika Catchings, the Tennessee wonderkid, pouring in 30 points. But the Irish girl finished with 12 and began to figure that maybe Stephanie (Gaitley, her coach) was right, that perhaps she could cut it in the big time.

"In the beginning, I just didn't know if I could survive at this standard, I thought that maybe I should opt for Stonehill, a division two school in Boston. The coaches kid me about that now."

She stepped softly at first, dazed a little by the sheer size of everything, taking in the variations in cuisine, stunned by the new training regime.

"For pre-season, we had to be stretching on the track 15 minutes before the session began at 6.0 a.m. Other mornings, we waded through the swimming pool to build up stamina. Everything is precise, you just be there in time. And they have this AA thing - attitude adjustment. Like, in first year, the coaches supervise this study period and if you're even two minutes late, they wake you at five the next morning for a three-mile run. Can you imagine? In Tullamore, I was late for everything. But you start to learn pretty fast," she laughs.

Although St Joseph's is an intimate campus, lying around 20 miles outside Philadelphia, they place a lot of emphasis on their basketball programmes and athletes want for nothing.

"They really look after you. You go to training and your gear is laid out for you. You have a card for canteen meals. Every time we travel to away games, we get an allowance to spend. We get laptops for school assignments. And they take care of their players, there is a real family ethos in St Joe's, which is something that impressed me from the start. It made it easier to adjust."

Moran learned to adapt on court as well, and her uncompromising athleticism has allowed her to cope with the taller Americans who began to consider the possibility of NCAA basketball around the age of eight.

"You learn. Like, if you throw a shot fake, a lot of players seem to take it. You can make space enough to drive to the basket and you normally get to the foul-line at least."

Throughout early winter, Moran built a set of statistics which have left the coaching staff at St Joseph's purring.

She averages around 12 points per game and hit four in 40 seconds against Villanova in December to give St Joseph's an edge in the divisional race for the Big 5 title.

"Before the game, the girls started telling me about the old rivalry between ourselves and Villanova, really got me focused. We're doing fine in our division, but we're gonna have to pick up a bit to make it in March." (The NCAA "March Madness" tournament is one of the most celebrated sports events on the American calendar.)

Already, she finds she is comfortable with the routine (or lack of it) of college hoops life: the week-long road trips, autographs for local kids, the remorseless pressure to win which sustains all top level varsity programmes, the late-night study, the friendships she has formed with Jana from Bratislava, Jane from Voor heesville and Angela from Hoboken, all team-mates, none of whom has heard of Tullamore.

By the time she was in Junior Cert class, Susan Moran had a set of keys for the school gym. She spent most evenings there, dragging her younger brother Mairtin across town to whip passes at her, and she'd drill shots from around the key, drive past her shadow, shoot freethrows. She was still raw then - a tennis player with an eye for the basket, no left hand worth speaking off - but she was possessed of this slowburning intensity which set her apart.

"When she began to play, I felt I had to learn some more about the game, to help herself and the others along," says Ann Ganly, her former coach at the Sacred Heart school. "She was always incredibly unassuming - I still remember her surprise at making the Midlands regional team. But, by the time she was 15, her potential had become very apparent."

When the Morans moved from Kilbeggan, Susan toyed with the notion of boarding at Banagher, but ultimately settled with the local school. A bunch of them turned up for basketball training, and within three years they were winning national schools titles. Just all happened to be athletic, one of those quirky things.

"She was a leader, always aware of the other girls' roles, always seemed to know she had more left in reserve," remembers Ganly. "A really nice girl, but so mentally tough. One time last year, she was playing in this international tournament in Moyne and she fell against a wall and came away holding her wrist. No way would she come off, and later, of course, it turned out she had broken it." A stream of record-breaking points totals at schools and international level gave rise to murmurings in Irish basketball circles about the Offaly girl's potential. Inevitably, she caught the eye of a scout who whispered her name in the States, and quickly the US colleges came calling. Letters, promises, occasional telephone calls from the players. She sat the mandatory SAT (scholastic aptitude tests) in Tallaght on the IBA Cup weekend last January, skipped across to the National Arena and smashed IBA scoring records in consecutive games. By that stage, no one was surprised.

"I have always tried to take things gradually. Could I make the school team? Would I be good enough to start? How much could I score? What about the Midlands team? And so on. Going to the States was another step. I just wanted to see," she explains.

So one day, Reggi Grennan, an assistant coach at St Joseph's, drove into Tullamore, found Susan with some friends in the gym and played some four-on-four. Later, they talked about St Joseph's and Susan liked what she heard.

"They let me know they were very interested, but they never smothered me, which was important. After I visited the campus, I knew I wanted to go there."

And now, at home for a few days at Christmas, little has changed. The town lights are the same, she gets to lie on in the morning. The old life, for a few days anyway.

December 25th, 1997. It's Christmas night and everyone is still drowsy from all that food and it's 11 o'clock and there's nothing on television, so you grab the keys and jog across town - which is silent - and the gym is shadowy and creaky, but you're used to that, and every bounce and swish echoes around the hall and you promise yourself just to shoot 100, no more. Then you lose count and forget you are alone and you're there just for the joy of hitting jump-shots.