Hearts of hockey bursting with joy, pain
For the first time since 2014, the Avalanche is headed to the NHL playoffs, and Colorado coach Jared Bednar has every reason to smile, despite the pain in his heart.
It is a measure of Bednar the man, and a peek into what makes him tick, to know that on the biggest night of this season, when Colorado beat St. Louis 5-2, the coach was tender with grief for a terrible accident one day earlier in his native Saskatchewan.
A nearly incomprehensible tragedy resulted in the deaths of 15 people, many of them young hockey players for the Humboldt Broncos, when the team bus was gruesomely torn apart in a collision with a tractor-trailer.
“That’s my hometown, eh,” Bednar told reporters Saturday morning. As a small child in Humboldt, did he dream of wearing a Broncos sweater? Of course Bednar did. The windswept prairie of Canada can be cold, dark
and unforgiving all winter long. But in a farming community with a population of about 6,000, the ice arena serves as a beacon of light. The Broncos are a junior team. Their players are adolescents, chasing a dream.
Before the puck was dropped in a showdown between Colorado and St. Louis, there was a moment of silence for a junior hockey team whose hometown is nearly 1,000 miles north of Denver.
The NHL is often treated as the ignored stepchild of the major professional leagues in the United States. But to dismiss hockey as a fringe sport is to miss a bigger truth. The game is a tight-knit family, from the peewees to the pros.
The 50-50 raffle at hockey rinks is a tradition as old as a goalie pounding his stick on the ice to signal the end of a power play. In Denver, inside an arena when reborn Avalanche fans and interlopers from St. Louis tried to shout each other down all evening long, half the proceeds from the raffle were earmarked for Humboldt’s shattered team.
“I know what that team means to that town,” said Bednar, who wrestled with his emotions when discussing the tragedy. “I have a couple friends — one of their sons is a goaltender for the Broncos — and he survived.”
Fifteen members of the Humboldt team did not survive the horrific crash on Highway 35.
When teenage phenom Sam Girard, standing just inside the blue line, buried a big old slapper to give the Avalanche a 1-0 lead during the final minute of the first period, the noise nearly blew the roof off the Pepsi Center. And it felt like old times in the barn that Joe, Peter and Patty built.
It was also impossible for me to ignore that Girard, at 19 years old, is roughly the same age as many of the Broncos. Logan Schatz, the captain of the team Humboldt loves like their own sons, was among the 15 crash victims. He died at age 20.
When Nathan Mackinnon, the big dog on a team of underdogs, ended a drought of nine games without a goal to give the Avs a two-score lead in late in the second period, it was pure joy — and Colorado drank it all in.
For the first time in four years, the Avalanche was going back to the playoffs. For fans, it was time to stand and shout, let all those frustrated yah-yahs out.
But this hockey town is also a Broncos town, and will be every remaining time the Avalanche takes the ice this spring.
If you love the game the way Bednar does, a little piece of your heart is scattered on the prairie of Saskatchewan.