ELIZABETHTOWN -- Heart attacks aren't supposed to strike 14-year-old star athletes.

But when Walter "Smitty" Marvin looked outside and saw his son Brock lying prone on the rocky ledge below their Elizabethtown home, he knew something was very, very wrong.

Brock remembers virtually nothing about what happened the day his heart beat out of rhythm, and less about the race to the hospital where he "flat-lined" as his heart stopped beating altogether, then miraculously -- or due to a perfect sequence of well-timed reactions -- started pumping again.

"Four doctors have told me, that kid's a miracle," Smitty says.

Sitting together in the family room, the father and both sons Brock and Connor, 12, shared their thoughts about what happened and what's ahead of them.

Brock recalled a dizzy spell a few days before the heart attack.

"At baseball practice on Friday, I got a little dizzy, but it went away quickly. I remember I couldn't see much," he said.

The Marvins called the doctor when they got home. But it all seemed rather ordinary.

Brock Marvin, an eighth-grader, had just earned a spot on the varsity baseball team.

An honor student since elementary school, the young man successfully completed his first season at varsity soccer earlier that fall. He played varsity basketball all winter and played star goalie in the Plattsburgh Indoor Soccer League for three years.

What happened next seemed surreal, even though Brock's mom, Darlene, has a similar heart condition requiring a defibrillator implant.

There had been no prescribed need for Brock to get an echocardiogram, Smitty said.

"It's just not something they do for routine physicals."

SUDDEN HEART ATTACK

On a Tuesday evening, shortly after baseball practice as the school year wound down, Brock and Connor were tossing a ball with Brock's golden labrador, Rocko, in hot pursuit.