One passing, and one memory

 So now I'm 18 years old again, with Cal Purinton gone. I'm 18 and it's 1973 and the Fort Wayne Komets are sweeping Port Huron out of the Turner Cup final, and it's time to go back to that little bandbox McMorran Arena and relive a night I have relived before.

If you read my column back when I was doing my sportswriter gig for the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, you'll recognize that night. I wrote about it several times, when the Komets were winning titles in 1993 and the early 2000s. I probably wrote about it too much. Nobody likes a retread, after all.

But now word has come down that Big Cal is gone at 78 after a long battle with cancer. And I've gotta go back there again, because as so often happens death rides shotgun with memory, the former remorselessly dragging the latter along with it whether it wants to come or not.

And so: McMorran Arena in Port Huron, one of the International Hockey League's more remote outposts. An April night in 1973. And Cal Purinton.

Who nearly ended my life that night, and probably never even knew it.

Cal was the classic tough-guy defenseman for the Komet, one of those stay-at-home blueliners who brooked no nonsense in his end and kept the goalmouth clean of enemy forwards and various other annoyances. You didn't mess with Big Cal, who scored just 36 goals in 524 games with the Komets but racked up 1,306 penalty minutes. He and Terry Pembroke -- also gone, sadly -- formed perhaps the Komets' most legendary defensive tandem.

But back to 1973.

My best friend and I were part of the bus caravan that made the four-hour trip to Port Huron for the fourth game of the final, figuring the Komets would wrap it up that night. Twelve busloads of Komets fans thought the same thing. That night half of McMorran was wearing orange-and-black.

And of course the Komets won, completing the sweep. Someone threw a garbage  bag on the ice as the clock got skinny.  It lay there in one faceoff circle as the horn sounded and we all headed screaming for ice level, and then onto the ice itself as the gates opened at one end.

So there I was, slipping and sliding and screaming my head off like the 18-year-old goof I  was. And then I turned around, and there was Big Cal, trying to make his way off the ice.

I don't think he ever saw me, because there wasn't much to see in those days. Just like Rudy from the movie, I weighed 100 and nothin' and stood 5 feet nothin'. And here came the biggest, toughest Komet of them all, bearing down on me like a Mack truck bearing down on a rabbit.

"Gaah!" I said, or something like that.

And then somehow got out of his way at the last second. Otherwise I probably wouldn't be writing this.

So there it is. There's my Cal Purinton memory.

And do I need to say how much I wish it hadn't come up again?