Ribbons of highway that bind a vast country.

Passion for a sport, hockey, that makes us us.

It should not end in tears and such immeasurable grief when they transect.

It should not end with a poignant epitaph from a surrogate mom who gave billet shelter to a trio of young men: “Goodbye my sweet sons.”

It should not be seared into a nation’s soul — we weep...

Sons who’d clambered onto a bus, headed for a Game 5 playoff match some 200 kilometres away across the flat Saskatchewan landscape, all excited and probably goofy in that boy-man way.

Fun, you know?

Lives cut abruptly and brutally short amid the twisted wreckage on Highway 35, broken bodies transported to hospital, first responders frantically sorting the dead from the maimed, the deceased to be identified by next of kin.
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Just about half of a hockey team dead, the pride of their families, their own lost generation now. Fate — tons of steel — slamming into them at a rural intersection.
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From a hospital employee, describing the Code Orange bloody scramble: “Last night can only be described as the longest, worst and most tragic night of my career. The images can’t be unseen or forgotten, the stories can’t be unheard or ignored. Meeting each family and explaining the extent of each injury was nothing short of a painful exercise of cruelty…”
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A parent’s worst nightmare. Only the details are different. Yet these details — hockey, a road trip — resonate deeply across Canada, a country stitched together for now in grief. A knife to the heart.
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Those of us who grew up in big cities don’t really know what a hockey team means to hamlets and towns, how their communities’ hearts throb in tandem with their fortunes, how wrenching such a disaster to a spot on the map like Humboldt, population 5,000. They are sons — and daughters — taken to the breast, many of them billeting with local families. Because, in Canada — as in the U.S. or Sweden or Russia — it is normal to send young athletes away in pursuit of a dream. Or just to play at a skilled level.
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What the team means to the community, “you can’t even … understand. Going around and playing in small towns, being able to be a part of one of those teams, is extremely special. That community and the other small communities around Saskatchewan live for hockey. They drive that team and players love living there. I speak from experience. The values that you learn playing in those communities stick with you for a long time.”
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Patrick Marleau, raised on a family farm in the tiny speck of Aneroid (population: 40), near Swift Current.

“Hockey is everything in Canada. But in Saskatchewan every community is fairly small so everybody knows everybody. You try to look out for each other and take care of each other. It’s very tight-knit.”

https://www.thestar.com/sports/hockey/opinion/2018/04/07/what-makes-us-us-is-hockey-and-our-unity-at-times-of-grief.html