HARRISONBURG - On the 200 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, formerly known as Cantrell Avenue, stands an ordinary two-story brick building.

It once served as the fraternity house for James Madison's Sigma Alpha Epsilon chapter, and that's where ESPN "College GameDay" producer Lee Fitting lived a familiar student lifestyle during his final two years in Harrisonburg.

"Sundays through Thursday afternoons, I did my work," said Fitting, who graduated from JMU in 1996 with a degree in mass communication. "And I partied Thursday, Friday, Saturday. I don't know, I just had a good balance. I think that's important.

"… To me, that prepared me for real life more than taking every little single opportunity and working non-stop. So I think it's important for kids now, you've got to find that balance. The stuff you learn in college about real life is going to be more valuable than anything else."

Much has changed for Fitting since those formative years - the Orient, New York, native has settled down a bit - but his laid-back, down-to-earth personality has certainly taken him a long way.

With ESPN bringing its popular college football pre-game production to JMU on Saturday for the Dukes' homecoming game against archival Richmond, it's also a homecoming of sorts for Fitting.

The 40-year-old resident of Avon, Connecticut, said he's back in Harrisonburg for the first time since 1997. Fitting returned to Madison that spring to enjoy a guys' weekend with some of his old college buddies and, amid the fun, ending up meeting his future wife, fellow JMU graduate Debbie Lucibello.

She's set to arrive at JMU today with the couple's two sons, 10-year-old Drew and 7-year-old Ryan. The boys have never seen Madison's campus, and Fitting said he plans to give them the grand tour, including a stop at the old frat house.

The ESPN jet setter loves his job, and this week in particular, Fitting is living out a dream.

"I never thought I'd be the GameDay producer, and I never thought I'd be doing it long enough where JMU would be as relevant as they have been," said Fitting, who has been producing the show since 2004. "To bring GameDay to a school like JMU, the stars have to like align, you know what I mean? There has to be a perfect, perfect storm for it to happen. And I wasn't going to lobby for it just to lobby for it. It had to be right for the show. The show comes first. Period."

Next July will mark 20 years at ESPN for Fitting. He started at the giant TV sports network as a temporary production assistant two months out of college, spending his time running teleprompters and cutting highlights for "SportsCenter" at the company's Bristol, Connecticut, headquarters.

Now he's the man pulling the strings behind the scenes for a three-hour live show with an average viewership this season of 2 million people that has become an ESPN staple.

"There's nobody in the world like Lee Fitting, and anybody who's spent a good amount of time with Lee will tell you that. It's hard for me when I talk about him publicly, because we try to keep this thing going where we pretend we don't appreciate each other a lot," said a laughing Samantha Ponder, who has been a member of GameDay's on-air talent crew since 2012. "But he really is the most talented producer I've ever worked with. It's such a difficult thing to be able to see big-picture and the here-and-now kind of simultaneously, and he's able to do that on 'College GameDay' in a way that really makes the show special."

Not bad praise for a guy who was admittedly more concerned about having fun than worrying about his classes during his time at JMU. These days, when Fitting speaks with college students who hope to make a splash in the media industry, he advises them to do what he didn't: write for the college newspaper, intern at the local TV station - in short, get your name out there.

It turned out that Fitting's one internship, a summer stint at ESPN's start-up magazine, landed him the contacts he needed to get his foot in the door in Bristol.

"You worked late nights and you worked weekends and you worked holidays, playing golf and softball and hanging out during the day," Fitting said. "It was sort of what you did. You made no money, but you were working for ESPN. Life was good."

Then came Fitting's big break. Over the years, he had worked his way into a feature producer's role - a job he confessed to be painfully "average" at. Realizing he wasn't cut out for the gig, and always having been fascinated with live TV, Fitting said he eventually went to his bosses in the spring of 2004 and pitched his own vision for GameDay.

They liked what they heard. And, after a summer of producing a handful of smaller live shows at ESPN, he was named GameDay's producer before the start of the 2004 football season.

In Fitting's 11-plus years in that position, he said three shows stand out above the rest: his first visit to North Dakota State in 2013, a trip to Virginia Tech in 2007 (the first Tech game after the school's shooting tragedy) and last year's stop at Mississippi's fabled Grove.

Now it's time for his alma mater to join the party.

"It sounds crazy, but it never feels like work," Fitting said. "We have such an unbelievable group, we're like family on this show. It's laid back. Everyone knows their role, everyone knows their job, everyone gives it their all. We set the bar really, really high amongst ourselves.

"Everybody knows that's the expectation, and it's awesome."