Winter of farewells

There's still a pile of white out there, a week after the big storm. We're ankle-deep in snow and February, full stop in the celestial calendar. It's a world of skeletal trees and monochrome landscapes and, when the sun shines in the afternoons, the first whispers of a better season in the angle of the light and the way it lingers the tiniest bit longer in the evenings.

Which is a gussied-up way of saying it's a time for both beginnings and farewells. Especially if you're of a certain age.

I am dead center in that certain age, and so the beginning for me is the beginning of realizing that the farewells are starting to pile up. And that certain farewells require certain seasons if they're going to feel at all right.

And so we come to say goodbye to Merv Dubchak today, here in the full flood of his season.

He was a winter boy from Kenora, Ont., who came to Fort Wayne 59 years ago to help make winter golden here, and he's the second of them to go in his season. Len Thornson, the best hockey player ever to chase a puck for the Fort Wayne Komets, passed not quite two months ago. Merv died at 81 yesterday, in February, which was only proper.

February in Fort Wayne, after all, was cold nights in a warm building with Merv or Lenny or Lionel Repka flying up and down the ice, playing a boy's winter game against the evil Dayton Gems or Port Huron Flags. It was the 1960s, and  a lot of Komets legends played in that decade, and Merv was one of them.

They called him Stubby, and he had a nuclear slapshot, and when he got it off on net whatever poor schmuck was manning the goal crease never had a chance. Sometimes he never moved until the puck had spanked the net behind him.

The red light would glare. The crowd would roar. And somewhere in all of that would come the boom.

Which would be Merv crashing into the endboards, unable to stop after his headlong flight down the wing.

Merv scored 321 goals in his seven seasons with the orange-and-black, still third alltime in franchise history, and abused heaven knows how many endboards. In the 1965-66 season, he put 72 pucks in the net. That's still the club record.

He was one of those guys who would have been in the NHL if he hadn't come up in the Original Six era, same as half the winter boys with whom he played in Fort Wayne. He's now the third of them to go in the last year, along with Lenny and Cal Purinton. The farewells keep coming.

The memories, however, remain. No full stop there, by God.