Who did cancer think it was messing with?

Deion Sanders doesn’t blink.

Football made him Prime, rich and famous.

But now the game has bestowed a far greater gift on Sanders.

Since a dark day in April, when a malignant tumor was discovered in his bladder, football has given Sanders a reason to live and the strength to stand up against cancer.

“I didn’t stare death in the face. I stared life in the face,” Sanders said Monday. “I’ve got too much life to be thinking about death.”

With a clean bill of health, Sanders is back on the job at CU, wearing a white cowboy hat and blue overalls and faith on his sleeve.

Coach Prime is convinced God has brought him back to Colorado to shape the lives of young men and bring championship glory to the Buffs.

“I always knew I was going to coach again,” he said.

“It was never in my spirit, in my heart, that God wouldn’t allow me to coach again.”

But there were moments when the future of Sanders and the CU program was dicier than Prime lets on. Early in this three-month fight, after the 57-year-old coach made the mistake of researching the mortality rate of bladder cancer on the internet, he promptly got his end-of-life financial business in order. The real reckoning that results in writing a will is how the act can force a man to consider what makes his life worth living.

“That’s not easy to think, to think you might not be here,” a somber Sanders said back in May, during a video recording released this week by his family.

But is he lucky? And blessed? No doubt.

Without any warning signs of his cancer, Sanders was fortunate that football helped find the devilish disease lurking inside him, when a medical examination during spring practice alerted doctors to abnormalities in his bladder.

A dangerous tumor, malignantly invading through the bladder wall, was removed. “I am pleased to report that the results from the surgery are that he is cured from cancer,” Dr. Janet Kukreja said.

But it requires more than good medicine to beat cancer.

There’s also the healing power in a sense of purpose that can make every sunrise a blessing.

The fight against cancer is seldom glorious. The struggle, however, almost always requires a mix of stubbornness, gratitude and humility.

Sanders declared: “I never once, during this whole journey, said: ‘God, why me?’ ”

He focused instead on the more than 1,600 Americans who die on a daily basis from cancer, and the pain it inflicts on family and friends of the victims.

“That ‘C’ word, when we hear that word, there’s normally a life sentence attached to it,” Sanders said. “But not this time.”

After choosing an aggressive treatment to have his tumor-ravaged organ removed and a new bladder fashioned from the fabric of his small intestines, the road to recovery began with the humbling step of Sanders going back to school for remedial potty training.

“It’s a whole life change. I’m going to be transparent. I can’t pee like I used to pee,” he said, cracking a joke to relieve himself of the stress, if not the nuisance, of getting used to a catheter in his life.

“I depend on Depends … If you see a porta potty on the sideline, it’s real.”

During recovery on his 5,000-acre ranch in Texas, Sanders would rise with the sun to go for a walk or fishing, accompanied by two bags that would fill with urine and blood.

While carrying that weight day after day, steadfastly refusing to burden two sons now off chasing their own NFL dreams with the truth or details of his serious health ailment, Coach Prime was left to wrestle alone with what matters the most during the finite days we all have on earth.

I asked Sanders how the doubts and fears instilled by cancer challenged or re-affirmed his commitment to a football job often coldly judged by numbers on a scoreboard.

“The decision I made and the surgery I chose was based on not just family. It was based on football. I didn’t want to be going weekly to the hospital while I’ve got practices,” replied Sanders, fired up by the opportunity to lead the Buffs to greater heights in his third season at CU.

“So football is in there (among the top priorities). But faith is No. 1. Football is somewhere down the line, behind family and all that.”

Faith. Family. Football.

In that order.

“I’m too blessed to be stressed,” Sanders said.

When death came knocking, unshakable and unbreakable reasons to live emboldened him with the conviction God was not ready for this to be the end of Prime’s time.

He refused to let cancer catch him, much less beat him, because Sanders was too busy chasing a tomorrow that’s never promised.