Here is a great story!! Enjoy!!



In the middle of a grueling six game road trip where a very young hockey team is away from home, the third game of the trip ends late on a cold Canadian Saturday night. This is the

only break on the trip and the three days between games allow them the only break

to get back home in their own beds for a couple of days before going back on the road. A scheduled commercial flight waits for them at Toronto's International Airport for the short flight home; they could be home by midnight. This plane departs on schedule, but without a single member of the hockey team. Back in the locker room a vote is taken after the game was complete, and a unanimous decision is made by this young team to skip this flight and stay one more day. They make arrangements to check back in the hotel and on a frozen Sunday morning charter two buses that have no heat and begin a journey two hours straight north into a sparsely inhabited Canada ,but where hockey is its passion. They arrive at their destination to the surprise of the teams general manager who is there attending his fathers wake.

After a few emotional hours, this team boards the buses and head back for a two-hour trip back to Toronto . On the way they ask the drivers to stop in a tiny Canadian town because they are hungry. To the shock of the patrons and workers at this small hockey town McDonald's, a professional team walks out of two rickety buses and into the restaurant, which just happens to have pictures of two members of this team on its wall. The patrons know every single one of these players by sight being fanatic fans of hockey in these parts. One can only imagine their

amazement of the locals seeing and entire professional hockey team sit down and have a meal in their tiny little town in the middle of a hockey season. After a while they board the buses and catch their same flight 24 hours later, giving one day to their general manager. Have I made this story up? Is this an excerpt from some fictional book? No. This a true story of the Blackhawks last Saturday night and they decided to attend Dale Tallon's fathers funeral. Its amazing that such a good story can be found nowhere on the internet, and not even

mentioned in the Chicago papers. Had one of the Blackhawks got into a fight and punched some drunken loser in a Toronto bar it would be plastered all over papers and the

television. This being said, its hard to imagine any professional football, basketball or baseball team doing this, but the members of the Blackhawks claim any "hockey" team would have done this. This is one reason I continue to be a big hockey fan, and another reason I

am excited about this Chicago team. I thought I would share as this story appears to have gone unnoticed. GO BLACKHAWKS!!!!

Hockey players are truly the class of team athletics. And these players truly understand that a team is the sum of all its parts. Not only the ones that perform on the ice. What a great story. thank goodness this story didn't slip through the cracks.We can all learn a leason from this story.

Thank you to who ever posted this.

What a great story.

It bears out what we all know and love about the people who are associated with the game. From managers, volunteers, coaches and fans, most feel a fellowship unlike any other sport.

Sure there are barbs and examples of poor sportsmanship just as there are in all team games.

When one of the hockey family needs their hockey family, in times of need, they are always there.

It is what sets this game's family apart from all others.


"There must have been some magic in, that old silk hat they found, for when they placed it on his head, he began to dance around."



Wayjoy

Mostly a true story...a little embellishment but still a great thing the guys did.

http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?t=496355

Heartwarmer: Blackhawks attend GM's dad's funeral on day off

When we found the story, it sounded almost too good and heartwarming to be true. Deadspin.com posted an e-mail from a reader that told the tale about the Chicago Blackhawks and one of the classiest moves by a group of players we've heard.

The team was in the midst of a six-game road trip and had just beaten the Toronto Maple Leafs on Nov. 22. They were scheduled to fly out of Toronto after the game, while GM Dale Tallon stayed behind to attend his father's funeral in Gravenhurst, a couple hours north of Toronto.

There was a team meeting, and instead of getting on the plane Saturday night, the team voted to charter busses and surprise Tallon at his father's funeral the next day. The team traded a rare day off during the grinding road trip to be there for their GM.
"A no-brainer," Blackhawks forward Adam Burish called the decision.

Along the way the players surprised customers by stopping in a McDonald's, where Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews autographed promotional hockey cards of the duo McDonald's happened to be giving away.

As the story spread across the internet, the chartered busses became unheated, broken down busses driven into the Canadian wilderness. But Tallon tells us that's the only exaggeration to the story.

"It's all true," Tallon told SportingNews.com., "except for the rickety busses."

When he first spotted team president John McDonough and a couple other people in management walking into the funeral home, for a moment Tallon said he thought he was in Chicago.

For a moment his mind was off his dad's funeral.

"It was incredible," Tallon said. "It was heart-warming and mind-boggling at the same time."

One by one, the players filed into the funeral home, paying their respects to Tallon and his family.

They looked at old photos of Tallon's father playing hockey and they shared stories. When hockey players talk about how their team is like a family, this was a moment where their action backed up their words.

"I'll always have a special place in my heart for these guys," Tallon said. "It means the world to me, it brings a tear to my eye every time I sit and think about it."


$$PM87$$

...and the raiders still arent ranked

What have the Raiders got to do with this post?