The KHL tragedy illustrates the danger athletes face as they transport from city to city.
It has always been left unspoken inside National Hockey League dressing rooms. Or any pro sports room we have been in, for that matter.
If the television in the players' lounge is tuned to news of a commuter plane crash, the channel quietly gets changed. If a reporter starts asking about the perils of air travel, their questions are awkwardly met, the conversation swiftly moved along.
In the back of everyone's mind, they know it. As a travelling reporter, I know it.
Scouts know it. Business travelers know it. Everyone in every airport knows it.
It is all a big lottery. One you hope never to win.
Somewhere between 150 and 200 planes of varying sizes crash in the United States every year - and that's only one country. The law of averages states that…
Hell, we all know what the law of averages state. And in that old sports cliché - "Only worry about the things you can control" - players, scouts, managers, writers, TV personalities just put it out of their/our minds, and board the next flight for the next town.
You couldn't work any other way. Honestly - if you can't fly you can't play or work in this industry in any capacity. Period.
So those 45 people boarded that plane in Yaroslavl, Russia yesterday for the season opener in Minsk, Belarus, and we would be surprised if even one of them considered the worst.
A fresh season lay ahead. Young players had made the team off of last year's World Junior club, like Daniil Sobchenko. Older ones like Pavol Demitra, who was rounding out a long career likely more for the love of playing the game than anything else, sat down and strapped up.
Brad McCrimmon, a Western Canadian lad born in Plenty, Sask., was likely at the front of the cabin. He was 52, and had waited a long time and traveled a great distance for his first head coaching job, that for that first chance to stand behind the bench as the head man.
When he died, the plane was taking off for Lokomotiv's season opener.
Hockey has been spared over the many years, mostly, with our losses limited to vehicular tragedies like the Swift Current Broncos bus crash, or the loss of two good men - Garnet "Ace" Bailey and Mark Bavis - on United Airlines Flight 175 a decade ago on Sept. 11.
There have been others, but not on the scale that other sports have suffered:
Italian soccer team Il Grande Torino was wiped out back in '49; Manchester United in '58, killing 23; The United States figure skating team in 1961; Thirty seven people from the Marshall University football team in 1970; Twenty-two members of the U.S. amateur boxing team died in Poland, in '80.
Whatever the odds are, the sporting world has taken its share of hits.
This summer, of course, has been different. Of all the seasons for our sport to see its number come up in the inevitable world of air travel, this would be the summer.
Sure, Russia's record of air travel is poor. But thousands upon thousands of flights take off and land safely there every day.
Why now? Why the one chartered by a hockey team embarking on a new season, with so many men we knew personally, and so many other we may as well have known?
Because they were all hockey men, and we have known enough of those to safely say that of the 43 dead, there were likely no less than 42 who you would find yourself swapping tales with over a beer, long after you'd hoped to have been back in your hotel room sleeping.
"At first we didn't want to believe it," said a Lokomotiv team official, quoted by Sovetsky Sport's Dimitry Chesnekov. "But right now there is no hope. The team is gone."
The team is gone. Those are words we could hear at any time, in any town.
"Though it occurred thousands of miles away from our home arenas," NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said in a statement, "this tragedy represents a catastrophic loss to the hockey world - including the NHL family, which lost so many fathers, sons, teammates and friends who at one time excelled in our League. Our deepest condolences go to the families and loved ones of all who perished."
We can, in fact, consider ourselves blessed that the poor lost souls in Yaroslavl are not part of a list in our sport, but the first - and we pray - the last team to be completely wiped out in a plane wreck.
No one wants to believe it. It is unthinkable when it happens to a team with a collection of familiar names in a place so far away, let alone if some National Hockey League team had drawn that fateful flight number.
So in a summer that has been marred with loss of life within the hockey family, we add to the three - Derek Boogaard, Rick Rypien, Wade Belak - another 44 deaths, which included members of the Lokomotiv team. There were some that National Hockey League fans knew well, and others from Europe, who were more well-known in their own countries.
But for anyone in the game, there is a connection with each and every one of them.
All you have to do is look in the mirror.
