On the other side of the country, a man named Charlie Conway was just dropping his luggage with a thud onto a hotel room floor.
A new opportunity.
Charlie's life had always revolved around hockey, ever since he was a little kid. Even when his under-funded D-5 peewee league team was a mess, even when his friends all called him "Spazway" for whiffing his shots, he still loved being on the ice. And when a disgraced lawyer named Gordon Bombay began coaching his team, things just got even more intense.
They changed their team name to the Mighty Ducks, and they won the playoffs that year. The next year, Charlie and most of his friends and Coach Bombay were all selected to represent the United States in international competition at the Goodwill Games. Coach had even figured out how to get them all scholarships to a prestigious prep school with a historic hockey program.
But the truth was that Charlie was a good hockey player, but not a great hockey player. He knew his career as an athlete was always going to end at the college level. So he learned coaching, instead. Following in his mentor's footsteps, he began as a volunteer coach with a peewee hockey league right out of college while he taught PE at a public middle school. A few years later, he was offered an assistant coach position at his own alma mater, Eden Hall. And when Coach Orion retired, Charlie was put in charge of the entire hockey program.
Five years ago, Charlie got a call from the Miami Waves, the very same Minor League hockey team that Coach Bombay had played for when he had made the push to go professional. Head coach. He thanked his athletes at Eden Hall, thanked the administration, and moved to Miami.
Most of Charlie's friends from his Mighty Duck days enjoyed hockey, but weren't quite as devoted to it as Charlie was. They all went their separate ways, some of them becoming construction workers, others becoming police officers, or other members of the Village People.
But not Adam Banks. Adam shared Charlie's passion, but he was much better at hockey. He was scouted out of high school, and easily made it into the NHL, being drafted by the Anaheim Ducks right after they had changed their name from the Mighty Ducks. It felt right that Banks should spend his entire career on that team, and he became a hometown favorite. He was never a super-star, but he made two all-star teams, and was always a respectable talent.
Just ten games into what was expected to be his final season, however, Banks sustained an injury to his wrist. The same wrist injury that had kept him out of much of the Goodwill Games as a teenager.
Maybe it was that reminder of his time growing up that had caused him to think of his old friend Charlie, when a family medical emergency caused one of the Ducks assistant coaches to leave the team, opening up a mid-season slot on the bench. Adam spoke to the Ducks ownership. Ownership spoke to Coach Conway of the Miami Waves. And two weeks later, Charlie found himself exhausted after a cross-country flight, checking into a hotel in Anaheim so that he could start his new assistant coach job the next morning.
The man didn't even bother to take his clothes off as he whumphed onto the single king-sized bed. And he would have fallen asleep immediately, if his phone hadn't run in the same instant.
"Charlie?" came the voice on the other end of the line.
"Hey Cake Eater," Charlie yawned his affectionate nick-name for Adam into his phone. "I just got in, and I'm exhausted."
"Charlie, something just happened."
The newly-minted NHL assistant coach was suddenly sitting straight up on his bed. "Are you okay?"
"Turn on the news."
Charlie scrambled for the hotel's TV remote and found a news station. There was a plane crash. The 757 that had been carrying the Anaheim Ducks back to California from their away game with the Minnesota Wild had crashed somewhere in Colorado. Everyone on board was dead. The entire team. The entire coaching staff. Everybody was dead.
Except for Adam Banks and Charlie Conway.
The two old friends were on the phone with one another for the next half-hour, trying to console one another, trying to figure out how to even wrap their minds around what had just happened. Then Charlie got another call, from the team owner. He said goodbye and took the call. And that's when he learned that he had been field-promoted to Head Coach.
