Running for Your Life: Humbled by Humboldt

Canada Day comes early this year.

It is Sunday, April 8, the day “Canada” gathers in a town community center to honor the memory of now 15 young souls who were taken from our soil too soon.

Here in the United States, it’s common to mark out phenomena that suggests “Canada.”

Excess politesse, humor more prone to savage self than the other, beer runs across wilderness.

No moment, though, better characterizes the Canada I know than how humbled its people are by Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Where a recent highway tragedy took the lives of these youngsters, members of an ice hockey team.

Think of Humboldt, hometown of NHL great Glenn Hall of the Chicago Blackhawks, who against steep odds backstopped them to a Stanley Cup in 1961, as a place where a large stone is dropped in a pristine lake.

The ripples are the community centers, the ice rinks, where Canadians gather across the country winter after winter.

These ripples are magic. They range wide and deep. The accident that killed sons who played for the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team is Canada’s tragedy.

It doesn’t just touch the country’s sports family, or its Saskatchewan family. But everyone who has ever skated on a backyard rink or watched a brother or sister do so. Who has entered a town’s “barn” and said, “Yeah, I get it. This is home.”

There is nothing cliché about this, a country, these shared experiences. We, as a country, are humbled by Humboldt, Saskatchewan. Noble and proud to forever truly feel a little of the loss of those who count themselves among the survivors.