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.
