Kaleb Dahlgren - Crossroads

A PRIL 6, 2018.

The day everything changed.

It was just another road trip, like the thousands that sports teams take every year. We werent thinking about life or death when we tossed our green and gold bags into the cargo hold, walked up the stairs with our necessities, and claimed our seats on the bus.

There was a game to playtwo hours away, against a team that had beaten us in triple overtime two nights before. The Nipawin Hawks had a three-games-to-one lead over us heading into Game 5 of the second round in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League playoffs. We needed to win this game. It was the only thing on our minds.

The Humboldt Broncos have been a fixture in Saskatchewan hockey for more than five decades. The green and gold sweaters were originally hand-me-downs from the Swift Current Broncos of the Western Hockey League way back in the early 1970s. However, the team quickly formed an identity of its own. Humboldt is an agricultural city of under 6,000 people, about an hour and a half east of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The team was run entirely by local volunteers, including the first coach. This tells you a lot about the nature of the Broncos. They are a team built by a communityand they remain a part of that community in every sense of the word.

Our team was the latest generation in that long tradition, and we wore our jerseys with pride every time we pulled them over our heads.

Row 12.

Our spots werent assigned, but we always gravitated to the same location every time we travelled on the busthe force of habit that only makes sense when you are part of a team. There are just certain things you know if youve been part of onerookies load the bus, vets get first dibs on seats.

I was one of nine twenty-year-old vets on the team, all of us in our last year of junior eligibility. I sat where I always did, in the fourth row from the back of the bus. If I wasnt involved in the card games and bad jokes going on around me, I could usually drown out the noise just long enough for a pre-game nap or to listen to music and think about life.

The bus was a safe place. Sort of like a home on the road. It was filled with teammates who were like brothers, and a collective group of personnel that was like a big family. Some of the best memories I have come from being on the bus... also, some of the worst.

There were twenty-nine people with ustwenty-nine different stories, and mine was just one of them. Each individual was an important part of the group we had become: from our veterans to our rookies and affiliate players, our play-by-play announcer to our statistician, our bus driver, our athletic therapist, and our coaches. Everyone played a pivotal role in building a team culture unlike any other.

Of course, I think we were pretty extraordinarythats why I wanted to be a Broncobut truth be told, we were also pretty ordinary in so many ways. A team just like any other, covering excessive numbers of kilometres, criss-crossing the flat prairies to different cities and towns.

Aisle seat. Drivers side.

We pulled out of the parking lot at the Elgar Petersen Arena in Humboldt close to 2:50 p.m. and drove across the street, turned a corner, and arrived at our coachs house. Darcy Haugan was much more than a bench boss; he was the kind of coach whose influence stays with you for a lifetime. The kind of coach who is more interested in what kind of men his players become than how many points they score or how many games the team wins. His wife, Christina, had cooked a pre-game pasta meal for our teameach pre-packaged into containers for every person on the bus. I remember Darcy running into his house to grab a belt hed forgotten for his suit, or maybe it was his shoesthere are just so many of those small details that I try hard to remember these days, but simply cant.

There are many things I do remember, though. Like how we took a slightly different route out of town that day. Just over halfway to Nipawin, we turned right towards Tisdale, instead of continuing on, like we usually did. Another small detail that charted our course that day. Not a big deal. It was just a five-minute detour. We hardly even noticed that our path had changed.

From Tisdale, Nipawin was just forty minutes away and we were just a couple of hours from game time. The game was still the only thing that mattered. Most of us were still in our stylish charcoal-grey Broncos track suits, which we always wore on the bus. These were the nicest track suits I have ever worn. Our suits were laid out flat in the overhead compartments above the seats.

We turned out of Tisdale, heading north.

Highway 35.

When we practised that morning, Darcy wanted to make sure we had taken care of every last detail. We had our backs to the wall against Nipawin but were not about to surrender. Youll know the feeling if youve spent any time with a team that is facing elimination. As we continued to make our way north, we were all in various states of pre-game preparation. Some of us sat quietly. Others had their headphones on and were listening to music. A card game involving some of the guys was finishing up just in front of me at the table with inverted seats. We were about thirty minutes out by then. So close.

It was the most important gameand potentially the lastof my junior career. I sat in my seat and turned on one of my go-to playlists to get ready.

This was going to be the best game I would ever play in my life. The best game we would ever play in our lives.

A few of the guys were standing in the aisle, putting on their suits. There was banter and laughter. I turned up the volume.

Highway 335.

And everything went black.