Editor’s Note: former Cannon writer and longtime commenter Dan Flashes reached out to ask if he could share a piece he wrote about his family and the 2024-25 season. This is something different than we usually do here but I think you’ll appreciate it.
In case you haven’t noticed (“And judging by the attendance, you haven’t,” —Harry Doyle), I haven’t been commenting here for a bit. I came to realize that the things I was working through in my personal life were affecting how I was interacting with people, and decided that I needed to take a self-imposed break from commenting on The Cannon (amongst other things, of course). I love that this community is still going strong, but I was not in the right head space to participate in it. That said, I was reading along with you all throughout the March Swoon and the April Push. This ending stretch of CBJ hockey was more than just a nice story of a team trying to make a playoff push against pretty long odds; for me, it was also a piece of healing.
I began many times to add a comment in the Game 82 recap, but there was just no way to really convey everything in a way that was digestible in that specific space. There are too many words, and in some ways there are no words.
The following is my attempt anyway.
July 2024
“We still don’t really know what this is.”
That is, in effect, what my father told us as we all gathered at his home in mid-July. My brother and his son had come up to visit and so I took my son up for a long weekend. We enjoyed the weather and their beautiful space by Lake Erie. Our nightly routine involved going to watch the sun set over the lake. The grandkids would play—often IN the lake itself—and the adults would sit and talk and admire the beauty of nature.
This was roughly a week before the Blue Jackets hired Dean Evason, and in a way we all were living that same experience as fans. A new President of Hockey Operations and GM had arrived, and a lengthy (at least, that was how it felt) coaching search was about to come to an end. We knew things were changing, but we didn’t really know how or how much. We didn’t know what this iteration of the team was going to be, yet; we didn’t know how much work Don Waddell and Dean Evason had in front of them.
We didn’t know.
My Dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer and had successful surgery to remove his prostate in 2015. He attacked it quickly and with tenacity like he did everything that was important to him. He followed that up with hormone treatments (to block generation of testosterone to starve out any remaining cancer cells) and radiation to the affected area. He put himself through a miserable six months to nuke any cancer cells into oblivion. And he did it. He crushed it. His PSA—the test marker used to identify prostate cancer cells—was “undetectable”. It generally stayed that way for the ensuing years. When it crept up, he would go on the hormone blockers again, even though they made him feel crappy. No half measures. And so it stayed for nearly a decade.
Dad had knee replacement surgery in January of 2024. He was determined to attack his rehab with that same intensity. He and I would travel to visit my brother in North Carolina almost every spring to play golf for a weekend, and Dad was determined to make that trip in April of 2024… and we did! Granted we only played two rounds instead of the normal three—and spent a couple hours on Sunday hitting balls and drinking beer at Top Golf instead—but he made it. He wasn’t 100% mobile, and he was starting to show his age more and more, but he set the goal and he crushed it.
So, when he started having lower back pain in the spring, he was intent on getting to the bottom of that, too. After all, the knee replacement had completely changed the way he walked and even the actual length of one leg; it totally made sense to us that there might be some offshoot of that causing his back to hurt. His PSA was still “undetectable”. Prostate cancer never entered our minds…
…until he had a back scan and the doctors noticed some spots on his pelvis.
“We still don’t know what this is,” he told us. But we all wondered and worried.
August 2024
I don’t need to tell any of you what this exchange was referencing. I texted my brother—we always text hockey—that morning when I opened my phone and saw the news. We couldn’t even get through more than a month as a franchise before yet another gut punch was waiting for us. In an instant of senseless selfish recklessness, two bright lights were extinguished. A family forced to very publicly mourn. Two wives widowed. Two sets of children—some not even born yet—with their fathers taken from them. There’s no way to prepare to lose a family member.
A team in the midst of so many changes was now forced to change direction again. Grieving a lost friend and teammate while preparing for a six-month grueling grind, all while getting used to a new coach and a new franchise mindset. I don’t believe we fans will ever truly know how difficult it must have been for this team, for these players, for this organization, for the Blue Jackets family. While it would have been hard for us as fans, I don’t know that any of us would have been upset if the players had just packed it in, had gone through the motions, even if some of them had wanted to move elsewhere.
PD had reached out to me in late July wondering if I might be interested in picking up some writing work for the site. (For those of you who weren’t around back in the 2010s I was a writer for the SBNation version of the site from 2011 – 2016. If I may toot my own horn, the game preview format is in large part still based on my original design and I’ve always loved that it’s stuck around this long.) We talked about what that might look like, but it kind of got stuck in purgatory for a bit. When we reconnected in September, I had to be honest with myself and with PD: “I never really gave you an ‘official’ response about writing, but I definitely wasn’t going to be able to do game previews; my work schedule just won’t allow it. And then, when Johnny happened, I just… I don’t think I could reasonably psych myself up enough to really get into writing regularly about this team right now. I was watching the game last night for a bit while folding laundry just to see how it would feel, and damn it when Bobby Mac started talking about Johnny on the Power Play and Kent Johnson… I just had to turn it off again. I’m still reading and checking in and all that, but I can’t make the investment of Self to really get inside the team and break things down.”
It can be so hard to find the joy in things you love when they become difficult. But find that joy we must. These Blue Jackets would remind me of that when I needed it.
Fall/Winter 2024
After two-ish months of various tests and a pelvic biopsy, we finally had our answer. The prostate cancer was, in fact, back, but had moved to the bones. It had mutated, hence the PSA marker not showing up in routine checks. It was on the pelvis, a couple of vertebrae, and in spots on a shoulder blade. Many of you may have often heard that prostate cancer is very treatable, and by and large, it is. In some ways, we actually considered this to be good news: we knew from past experience that radiation and anti-hormone treatments were very effective against this kind of cancer. It was going to be grueling, but there was a plan, a series of “if-then” statements about how to move forward. While there would be no way to completely eradicate the problem, there was a plan to mitigate it and live through it.
Both Dad and the Blue Jackets tried to keep an even keel even as things were in chaos around them. Columbus hovered around hockey-500 for most of the calendar 2024 portion of the season. Dad did his radiation treatments, took his oral chemo medication, and got his hormone ablation treatments. For both, it was largely a waiting game: waiting to see how things would come together, waiting to get healthy, waiting to see what was next. They’d have good stretches and bad stretches, but it all largely seemed to even out over time. In many ways it was all we could ask for.
Dad felt generally pretty crappy due to his treatments, but his mindset has always been: define the problem, then attack the problem. He would talk about his impatience in waiting for the determination of what treatment piece was next up. He didn’t want to wait and see; he wanted to MOVE. We made our plans to visit for Christmas. He was in most ways his usual self: his sense of humor was still intact and as self-deprecating as ever. He could get around, though he had a cane with him just in case. He was tired a lot; to be expected. But, he wasn’t letting the disease win in the Jimmy V sense. Things were hard but generally feeling positive; no one anxiously awaited the next step more than Dad.
The Blue Jackets, and hockey in general, were a distraction of sorts. Given the overall mission of this website, I will not get into the weeds or get on a soapbox, but in addition to the uncertainty of my Dad’s health, let’s just say that the election results have had a very seriously negative effect on the career paths both I and my spouse have chosen, as well as other members of my family. Given all of this additional stress on my life, hockey was the distraction. My brother and I texted almost daily about hockey and our teams. That the Blue Jackets had, in spite of everything put in front of them, become an eminently watchable team after basically four years of being abject trash was a lifeline for me.
I had no idea how much more of one it would become.
January 2025
In a way, both my family and the Blue Jackets were hoping that weathering the early storm had prepared them for a set of positive next steps. Columbus lost Sean Monahan to a wrist injury, but Adam Fantilli seemed to have a light come on for him as he jumped into the top center spot. So, in spite of a very bad break with Monahan going down in the midst of a point-per-game season and tremendous chemistry with his Russian line mates, there seemed to be a bright light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. The CBJ went on a mini-tear in early January, and finished the month on a 10-2-1 run. In spite of everything they had gone through, it looked like things were coming together.
Dad was waiting for a “next steps” scan, to see how the first round of treatment had gone and then decide what to do next. He had made it through radiation and was sticking to his pill regimen even though it made him feel tired and crummy almost daily. We were hoping and needing the scan to give us good news, to give Dad a break. The week of the scan came, and I had planned a weekend jaunt up to their place with my son for the weekend at the end of January wrapping into February. The scans themselves were a mixed bag: the spots that had gotten radiation showed effective treatment and were appearing inactive; however, where they could not radiate the treatments had been ineffective. The new plan was to talk to an oncologist about next steps—most likely a more aggressive form of chemotherapy—and gird ourselves up for that part of the journey. On that Friday, I got to work early, had a plan to leave early, get my son after school, and head north.
Needless to say, the text that arrived from my step-mother as I was pulling into my parking space was a let-down: “We may have to change our weekend plans. We are in the Avon ER. Rapid atrial fib flutter. He has not been doing well anyway and now this. Will keep you posted.” Those of you that were around when I “left” writing for the Cannon back in 2016 may remember that all the men on my paternal side have some form of this heart arrhythmia where your heart can beat irregularly and race when your body has to do any kind of activity. Having that in his weakened state meant a trip to the ER.
We had to cancel our visit, but I did take the day Sunday to go and visit him in the hospital. He was much weaker than even at Christmas, but with mild assistance could still get around. I spent the afternoon with him, just the two of us. We talked about things both serious—for the first time the subject of “what if” came up—and fun. My brother called and the three of us watched the final round of the PGA tournament on TV together, as we always did when we were together in North Carolina for our golfing weekends. He was complaining of some stomach issues, but it just seemed to be a collection of the various effects of the drugs and radiation he was going through. They did some additional scans as a precaution.
I left to go home, and he himself got to go home the next day, his heart back in normal rhythm. It felt like an inconvenient speed bump on the way forward.
February 2025
For the Blue Jackets, February began the complete opposite of how January had gone. Four straight losses, and a big loss of Kirill Marchenko to a freak broken jaw as he was hit by a puck while sitting on the bench. I listened to that Dallas game on my way home from visiting Dad in the hospital. I didn’t think it some harbinger of things to come—I am comfortable enough with my own belief system not to truly subscribe to such notions—but coming on the heels of four straight wins it was a total balloon deflator. While the Four Nations Faceoff loomed—in essence a free two weeks for guys to get healthy and catch their breath—limping into that break on fumes and having lost your best forward—while still missing your second-best forward—was certainly not the follow up to January we’d hoped for.
My family was feeling that in our own journey. Dad was home on February 3rd. He was still dealing with stomach issues—both in terms of lack of appetite and in terms of GI discomfort—but he was home, he was resting, and he was waiting to hear what was next. The scan had showed spots on his liver and with those digestive symptoms there was concern of a different kind of cancer. It would certainly explain the lack of response to the treatment in some areas. He had done all he could to put himself in the best position to fight his battle, but much like a freak puck to the face sitting on the bench, his body just kept having other plans.
So it was that the following Sunday night, he was back in the ER with a bowel obstruction. The initial belief was that, due to the dietary struggles he had been having, his body was having trouble moving things properly and, for lack of a better term, things were just “clogged”. On Monday, February 10th, however, I got a text from my step mother that was more sobering.
We spoke on the phone. She had worked her entire career in medicine as a nurse of many stripes. To hear her voice so shaky, hear her clearly rattled… it rattled me. I rushed home, packed a bag, and drove straight there. He was worse off than when I’d seen him the weekend prior. He was so tired, couldn’t really move, couldn’t sit up. They were treating the specific symptoms of the obstruction, but we had to simply wait and see. Surgery was ruled out due to his weakened state. The hardest part of the ensuing two weeks was the yo-yos. One hour he’d be feeling better, there would be talk of him leaving the hospital to move to a rehab center to get stronger and consider chemotherapy. The next hour he’d be lost, not sure where he was, in pain.
My brother made plans to come up. I returned home for a few days but then came back. I was supposed to return home a second time, but that didn’t happen.
I know that I’ve shared a lot of detail to this point, but I’m going to forgo that from here. My brother and I fell into a routine that second hospital week: we’d spend the days at the hospital, figuring out from hour to hour what was next. We’d go back to their condo in the evening. We’d drink bourbon. We’d watch Four Nations hockey games. Hockey was our one constant distraction. I was driving back to Columbus the night of the round-robin US/Canada game and had parked at a charging station as things kicked off:
Hockey was what we had. It was our distraction. When I got back up there, he and I spent a lot of down time when there weren’t games on talking about our teams. We talked about other things, of course, but the thread of hockey was the thing we could come back to when we needed a break, when we needed some levity, when we needed something that wasn’t sadness.
The US/Canada final was on Thursday.
On Friday, we made the decision that Dad should move to hospice care.
On Saturday evening, we said goodbye.
February of 2025 was the worst month of my life.
But, there was a tiny sliver of hope buried somewhere in there. This is the last text from the month of February that I have from my brother:
March 2025
To call the Stadium Series game a success is one of the biggest understatements of the season. I hadn’t gotten tickets, and while part of me will always carry the regret of not being able to say “I was there” with all of you, even if I had gotten tickets I don’t know that I could have handled it from an emotional standpoint. When the time came, I told my wife that I wanted to watch the game somewhere in public, simply because I did want to experience it with other people; it was a once in a lifetime event. It seemed like everyone in Columbus who cared was down at the Shoe; we had to try three places to find someplace where, when I asked when we walked in, could definitively say they’d have it on TV WITH THE SOUND UP through the entire place. At one point I told my wife maybe we should just go home, admit defeat. To her credit, she didn’t let me.
After the miraculous finish to the Stadium game, the Blue Jackets had won four in a row. But even with that going on, I was a bit of a rudderless ship. I returned to work the week following the Stadium Series game, but I didn’t feel like going to work most days. On the really bad days, I didn’t see a point to even getting out of bed. I told some friends at one point: “I’m really, really trying to compartmentalize things that make me happy and focus energy on them. I’m trying to put energy into being a good husband and father. I’m a passable employee right now, and between losing my father and watching our society largely decide the career area both my spouse and I have chosen to focus our lives on just doesn’t matter anymore, it’s really hard to be psyched up for much of anything.” (Public Service Announcement: Depression is real, and it is serious, but you CAN talk to someone about it. There’s no shame in it. I did, and am. It is helping me. If you’re fighting these battles, please don’t fight them alone. People are here to listen and to help.)
The Blue Jackets seemed to follow suit. Following that Stadium game they went 1-7-1 and were shut out four times. They went from being solidly in the playoffs to needing to pull off a miracle. It seemed like my one coping mechanism had left me in the darkest hour. They won three of four, but then three more straight losses including TWO more shutouts felt like the final curtain on the season.
There were six games left. While mathematically still possible, it seemed hopeless. But, as I continued to work through my grief the CBJ—still no doubt working through grief of their own—decided to give me a boost. Pure and simple, those final six games, though they ended up not “mattering” in the grand scheme of things… they MATTERED to me.
The last thing I told my Dad—who was with us in body still—was that if he was ready, if he felt like he needed to go, it was OK. He could go. After going through a repeated stretch of having hope and things seeming lost, I had some modicum of acceptance. And, I think that all of us would have understood if the CBJ were just ready to be done. I still cannot fathom how those guys got off the mat in August and put together the season they did. So, if that 4-0 in Ottawa had been that moment, I was sad, but I had accepted it for what it was. If they were ready, they could go.
But then when their time came, these Jackets simply refused to go. They were not ready.
OK, Ovi had broken the record. They started some poor schlub in goal. Surely the next game of the back-to-back would be the Capitals asserting their dominance.
With the Hurricanes having long since locked in their spot at #2 in the Metro, my brother went all-in pulling for the CBJ. We certainly no longer had the 2/3 matchup hope to root for, but we both seemed to know that the Jackets were giving me a boost that I surely needed. But, as the Habs played host to the lowly craptastic Blackhawks (no word at press time whether or not Carey Price was injured), surely, this was the end of the CBJ run.
I, for one, thought Philly was the “trap” game. Last game on the road, still needing some help, a physical bunch of Flyers; I was worried. After all, I’m sure the Habs looked past the Blackhawks a bit and it cost them. I thought, and told my brother, that if we got to that Thursday night game just needing to win to get in with the Islanders having been checked out since the TDL, that we were in. Just needed to not look past Philly.
Spoiler alert: I didn’t really have faith in the Carolina try-hards. I was at the CBJ/CAR game to end the 23-24 season, and I saw how they played. What I hoped, however, was that Montreal was going to be gripping their sticks so, so tight that Carolina’s try-hards would put enough pressure on them that they’d choke. And, as I watched an otherwise meaningless season-ending game between Montreal and Carolina’s AHL squad, at 1-1 late in the 2nd period I could see it. Montreal was getting chances and flubbing them. They HAD to be feeling the pressure on their backs.
Alas, two quick goals at the end of the second period, and I turned the TV off. It was over. Like it does for 31 teams every season, Columbus’s run had ended. Again, I—and I’m sure many of you—would not have blamed the CBJ for mailing in game 82 vs. the Islanders. I had traveled to visit family for the Easter weekend so I didn’t get to watch the game live, but I checked my phone fairly regularly and just loved seeing that they again did not go quietly into that good night.
Every day feels different. There are days where nothing feels right. There are days where something happens and the one thing I would give anything to be able to do is tell my Dad about it. There are days where I wonder, “Shouldn’t I be sadder right now?” There are days where I wonder, “Why am I still THIS sad?”
But, in the context of this piece, every day—at least for now—there is still hockey. There is another season of my adopted playoff Carolina Hurricanes. There are games every night, though that will wane over time. There are crazy moments—Winnipeg with 1.6 seconds left!—and fun matchups, and there is still so much good hockey to watch. And the best part of that for me is knowing that every morning my brother and I will have our hockey debrief. We’ll talk about the games, talk about who looks good, who looks vulnerable (*cough*Caps and Jets*cough*), and it reminds me each day of how much I love this sport and how much, without really realizing it in the moment, it is helping to get me through the darkest time in my life.
If I continue on this parallel thread of hockey and grief, there’s one last thing that I would share. Obviously, I’m sad. I’m sad that we didn’t get more games from these Blue Jackets. I’ve of course devastated at losing my father. The hardest part is that neither of them were “done”. As my brother’s response noted above, I think the Blue Jackets as they were playing would have given the Capitals fits in the playoffs; certainly as much as Montreal did and probably more. They were playing with an absence of pressure, and for arguably the first time all season everything clicked into place and they just looked so strong. Not getting to see that group just get a shot… that’s disappointing.
And, while my Dad died with or of cancer—it’s not a distinction I care to make—he never got that last chance to give cancer his full on hell of a fight. After a long talk with a doctor during his final stay in the hospital, I distinctly remember him saying, “The most frustrating thing is that none of this has anything to do with treating my cancer.” He wanted that fight, even if his body may not have been up for it anymore. He didn’t get his chance. I would have hated to lose him no matter the cause—to be stark, things were looking pretty difficult no matter what—but I would have loved for him to have had the chance to fight it on his own terms, to decide for himself what was next.
We all have people close to us, and we’re all guilty of taking the days with them for granted at times. Yes, you know deep down that, as your parents age, nothing is forever, but there’s no way to sit down and truly “get ready” to say goodbye to someone you love forever. When they are taken away from you when you aren’t expecting it hurts all that much more.
Finding the joy is the hardest thing. It will always be the hardest thing. This hockey team helped me by simply not giving in. They got out of bed each day and, win or lose, they powered through. They grieved publicly, privately, and on the ice after goals. They went to work every day and saw their friend’s jersey hanging in his locker, knowing they’d never get to play hockey with him again, talk to him again. And they just. kept. going. Even when it was hard. Especially when it was hard. And even when things looked completely over, they did not quit. It felt like so much of what happened those final two weeks of the season was being ordained from above, like Johnny was skating with the team, helping them get where they needed to go, trying to guide them home.
I found an old picture that I set as my phone wallpaper:
It’s from many years ago when my son was very little. He and my Dad were walking down to the lake together on Father’s Day weekend. That picture has always been one of my absolute favorites; it’s made me smile, made my heart burst with joy, seeing the way my son held his grandfather’s hand. I will forever feel fortunate that fate had me standing where I was behind them and that I had the presence of mind to stop and snap the shot with my phone.
The picture hits different now, of course, for many reasons. My son is older; my parents don’t live on that street anymore. In some ways, everything about it is different, but the beauty of a great photo is that one can be taken back to that moment again and again each time we see it. Every time I pick up my phone, I’m there again on that warm June day.
But I also like to look at it now in a different light. In the captured moment of this photo, my Dad was guiding my son, keeping him safe, helping him get where he needed to go.
Now I look at it and I still see all of that, but I also see more: I see the spirit of my young child walking with my Dad, guiding him home.