It was the end of the week. We were the only ones left in the lab. Steve was sitting at his computer. I was packing up for the long drive home. Somehow the conversation turned to hockey.<\/p>\n
Don’t ask me how. But there we were late on a Friday afternoon in Houston, Texas talking about hockey.<\/p>\n
He told me what a great game it was. I told him what I thought about the fights. He told me it was a lot like the Indy 500\u2014you know what the fans come to see, right? I nodded but pointed out that as far as I know drivers don’t intentionally cause accidents.<\/p>\n
He stood there in the middle of the lab for a moment, gathering his thoughts.<\/p>\n
“Hockey,” he said, holding up his hand, “is about human interest.”<\/p>\n
I looked at him and probably scowled. I didn’t know what he was talking about.<\/p>\n
“Let me explain,” he said.<\/p>\n
And so he told me about a game that he had seen in Toronto. One of the coaches had been struggling with brain cancer. During a commercial break, they projected a picture of his face on the ice.<\/p>\n
Steve stood silently, looking for the right words.<\/p>\n
“They projected his picture on the ice, and…”<\/p>\n
He had stopped talking and was looking down at the floor. His face was flushed, and his eyes were starting to tear.<\/p>\n
“and…” he said, now barely able to get his words out.<\/p>\n
“and… the players from both teams … stood around his picture … on the ice and … banged their sticks on the ice.”<\/p>\n
He was barely able to get those last words out. As he sobbed the end of his sentence, he quickly turned back to his desk and sat down.<\/p>\n
I stood there for a moment. He sat there looking at his keyboard. I walked over to him.<\/p>\n
“You’re a good man, Steve,” I said, pushing my fist into his arm. “You’re a good man. And now you’ve got me teary.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was the end of the week. We were the only ones left in the lab. Steve was sitting at his computer. I was packing up for the long drive home. Somehow the conversation turned to hockey. Don’t ask me how. But there we were late on a Friday afternoon in Houston, Texas talking about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[92],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1619,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/1619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/augerhandle.net\/blogs\/jumpingfish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}