Hockey heartache

As the calendar turns from August to September, we in these parts tend to eagerly anticipate the start of another hockey season and the eight month grind-it-out-at-all-costs pursuit of Lord Stanley's fabled mug.

We love the game.

We live the game.  

And now, perhaps more than ever, we need the games to begin, if for no other reason than to escape the grips of tragedy that have thus far marred the 2011 off-season.

But for a tiny, tenuous tie, I am connected to the NHL, to the world of professional hockey, as no more than a follower. Still, as a hockey player, as a fan of the game and a lover and defender of the sport, as someone who lurks only on the outer fringes of a tight inner circle, I am like so many others lately, finding it increasingly difficult to contextualize the incomprehensible losses the hockey community has suffered in just four short months.

Derek Boogard of the New York Rangers in May.

Rick Rypien of the Winnipeg Jets in August.

The just-retired Wade Belak last week.

And now, an entire team out of Russia's Kontinental Hockey League, wiped out in a shocking plane crash just hours prior to puck drop on the opening day of the 2011-2012 KHL calendar.  

Among the departed, the prolific Pavol Demitra, at one time property of the home-town Senators, ill-fatedly dispatched a season too soon for what amounted to a bag of pucks and a half-dozen water bottles.

He was an all-star.

Practically a point-per-game player in his post-Senators days.

He is gone.

Too soon.

Just like the rest of his teammates, including another former Senator, defenseman Karel Rachunek.

Unspectacular but dependable, he patrolled the Ottawa blueline for four-plus seasons.

Neither flashy nor formidable, Rachunek was best counted on to foil a rush coming at him one way and to relaunch the attack with gusto in the other.

Like Demitra, he is gone now too.

And like his teammate, gone too soon.

There is the coach, Canadian Brad McCrimmon, whose face and low-slung helmet I remember from the first hockey cards I ever collected -- Pro Set -- in the early days of 1990, but whose name I recall from even before then, from when I was just discovering the game and the professional players I hoped to one day emulate.

Josef Vasicek, the one-time Carolina Hurricane, easily identifiable for the odd-for-hockey number he wore -- 63 -- and easily recallable for the ear-to-ear grin we couldn't help but notice as Carolina celebrated its 2006 Stanley Cup championship.

Karlis Skrastins.

Ruslan Salei.

Alexander Karpovtsev.

Igor Korolev.

All names I know. Faces I can see. Players I can somehow tie to a memory of the game or to a second-hand tale I remember hearing or reading somewhere.

They, and the rest of the Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey club, are tragic and senseless additions to the now long list of hockey's recently departed. Players, but also people, pilfered in their prime, taken before their time, in ways far too tragic to even seek to comprehend.

In sport, losing is unacceptable. But in life, losses are far more poignant and permanent.  

So as the curtain soon rises on the 2011-2012 hockey season, in the NHL, in Europe, in the professional and amateur ranks everywhere, may the sun also set on the summer of 2011 and what will be remembered as the heartache era in our game's long and fabled history. 

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