An Orthodox Jewish kid trying to make it as a major junior player. It was a feel-good story. At least it started out that way.

Again.

Benjamin Rubin had expected to play. He had hoped to be back on the first line, reunited with Angelo Esposito who had picked him up from in front of his house for the drive to the arena. Esposito had been away for a few weeks with the world junior team. Now everything was going to fall back into place. That's what Benjamin thought.

Benjamin was stretching in the hallway with his teammates when Pascal Vincent called him into his office. The coach of les Juniors de Montreal didn't bother with a song and dance about this being the hardest part of his job. Didn't even bother with explanations. Benjamin didn't bother telling him that he hadn't been given a fair chance, not when he had been buried on the fourth line. Vincent just handed him a couple of garbage bags and told him to clean out his stall in the dressing room and to leave his sweater and the team hockey bag behind.

"What are you doing?" Esposito asked when Benjamin started emptying his locker.

"They released me," he said.

"They what?"

A hush fell over the dressing room. Nods, but no words. Heads turned away.

Benjamin didn't have a ride home. Too close to game time to ask a now former teammate. He couldn't phone home, couldn't even call a cab. It was, after all, a Saturday afternoon.

Hockey's the coldest game but this was chillier than usual. A 30-year-old minor-league journeyman would have had a hard time with getting cut loose midway through the winter, too late for another team to sign him. Benjamin's just 19 and Quebec league teams had set their rosters. He knew there was no hope of landing with another team on short notice. Still, he kept it together. He had gone through this same thing last season.

He walked out of the arena with his garbage bags while fans in Montreal sweaters filed in. He hoped no one was going to recognize him. He hoped a cab will stop for him. He had been prepared to pay almost any price to make it to the NHL. He never imagined it was going to end this way.

*

Okay, look at this scene. You have questions. Why didn't he drive himself? Why weren't his parents at the arena? Why couldn't he even call a cab? Look at that line: It was, after all, a Saturday afternoon.

Benjamin's an Orthodox Shomer Jew. Shomer Jews strictly follow the Torah. The Torah forbids "work" on the Sabbath, Friday night to Saturday night. The Torah's list of the forbidden acts starts with planting, plowing and reaping -- 39 items, what a homesteader might have done hundreds of years ago, writing and starting a fire as well. In ancient times those who violated the word of the Torah were driven out or even stoned to death. There's no stoning anymore and rabbis updated the definition of "work": no driving a car, no flipping an electrical switch, no channel-surfing, no downloading.

And no hockey. It's not there in writing. Doesn't have to be. Just assumed. There couldn't be hockey if you couldn't pick up a stick or lace up your skates. By the word of the Torah, almost anything you do at the rink would be work.

Growing up Benjamin was like other kids in the west end of Montreal six days of the week. He wanted to play hockey and did. All through grade school, he was one of the best players in his age-group in the city's best leagues.

One night a week other kids played but he didn't. He couldn't. Friday nights they'd head to the arenas while he'd head to the synagogue.

Growing up, he was good enough that Montreal 's best teams still wanted him even though they knew he couldn't play in half their games. "I didn't envy the kids who played on Friday nights," he says. "I've had to give up some things to practice my religion but my religion makes me stronger and makes me a better person."

Character wasn't enough when the game got serious. "By the time Benji was 14, he couldn't play in best leagues, the AAA leagues because of the games he'd miss," his father Michael says.

Kids who hadn't been able to keep up with Benjamin a few years before were picked up by Quebec junior teams at age 16. Benjamin wasn't. He landed a tryout with les Remparts, the team in Quebec City. A family friend had an in with Patrick Roy, the future Hall of Famer and now the Remparts' owner and coach. Roy knew up front that Benji couldn't play on the Shabbat. Roy thought it was just going to be a courtesy deal. His Remparts were the defending national champions. And, after all, kids out of AA just don't make it to major junior.

Even now Benjamin makes the tryout sound like he was skating with the Canadiens. "Every pass was perfect," he says. "Everybody was faster. Everybody knew exactly where to go and what to do."

Roy saw enough in two practices. Benjamin made the cut. That was back in Sept '06.

It started out smoothly. Benjamin moved in with an Orthodox rabbi and his wife. Rabbi Dorvid Lewin didn't know a thing about hockey. He didn't know from Patrick Roy. He and his wife had arrived in Quebec from France only a few months before. No matter, Benjamin observed the Shabbat with Quebec 's tiny Orthodox congregation, about 100 in all.

Everything started smoothly at the rink as well. His teammates called him Benji. Or Rube. He was the first Orthodox Jew that the kids from small-town Quebec had ever met. It was an education for them. "They respected me when they saw me carrying my Kosher food onto the bus for a road trip," he says.

"A good junior player," one NHL scout told me.

I called les Remparts in January of 2007 to set up an interview with Benjamin. No go. There had been a few stories in the national media about his bid to become the first Orthodox kid to play at such a high level. By mid-season, though, the team had put a hold on any media requests directed for Benjamin. "Patrick Roy wants him to focus on hockey," a team spokesman told me. I put in several requests for a phone interview with Patrick Roy. He did not return calls.

Benjamin scored only three goals that season. Because he couldn't play or even travel on the Shabbat, he played in only 29 games over a 70-game schedule. Roy didn't dress him in the playoffs.

Benjamin didn't gripe. "If a coach can pick between two players who are about the same but one can play every night and another can't, the choice is pretty clear," Benjamin says.

That's when Benjamin's father Michael Rubin went to his rabbi, Rabbi Leib Baron of the Montreal Torah Centre. He told him that Benjamin needed to play on the Shabbat to pursue his chosen career. The rabbi gave Benjamin a dispensation: He allowed Benjamin to play hockey as long as he observed the high holidays and did no "work" on the Shabbat that wasn't related to hockey. He could play at the arena on a Friday night but he couldn't drive to and from the rink or flip the light switch in his hotel room on a road trip. It wasn't going to be easy but it was going to allow him to miss only four games over the course of the season.

*

In the summer of 2007, les Olympiques de Gatineau traded for Benjamin. Their GM, Charlie Henry, knows about the Shabbat. When he was young he used to be the Shabbat goy, the gentile whose job was to go to Orthodox families' homes on the Sabbath and shovel coal into their furnaces. He understood Benjamin's situation. From talking to him, I'm sure that Henry admired Benjamin's commitment to the team.

Benjamin's first game on Shabbat fell on Saturday afternoon in September: an assist and plus-one in a 6-2 win over Victoriaville . A good start.

There were other good moments. When Gatineau had a game in Halifax on a Friday night, a long road trip, an Orthodox family brought Benjamin a Kosher meal. After, while his teammates checked into the hotel, Benji went to family's home and observed Shabbat.

Benjamin says in all his time with the team he only heard one bad word. Not by a player or coach. Just from a fan heckling.

This seems like a small thing but it isn't. In Quebec "reasonable accommodation" is a controversial issue : the idea that government, schools and companies should adjust to the cultural or religious needs of people outside Quebec 's mainstream. Many Quebeckers don't like it. They think it's reasonable for others to assimilate -- accommodating the majority. After all, it's a province where signs in English are banned, where a team of young girls are kicked out of a soccer league because a player wore a hijab. Sometimes it's hard to sort out where the desire for political separation ends and a vision of homogeneous society begins. As Montreal author Mordecai Richler wrote in The New Yorker in the early 90s: "Jews who have been Quebeckers for generations understand only too well that when thousands of flag-wavng nationalists take to the streets roaring 'Le Quebec aux Quebecois' they do not have in mind anybody named Ginsburg ..."

It seems like playing on the Shabbat wasn't enough to reasonably accommodate les Olympiques. Benji struggled to find his place, just one goal in 17 games. "I never got a chance to play on the first or second or even the third line, not even in pre-season," he says.

The breaking point came after a Saturday morning practice in November. Claude Giroux, Gatineau's star player, promised Benjamin a ride home. Made sense. Giroux, a first-round pick of the Flyers, had, as you'd expect, the best ride on the team. But while Benjamin waited at the door the Gatineau coach, Benoit Groulx, called Giroux into his office. Benjamin must have missed Giroux leaving. Or maybe, Benjamin later suspected, the coach told Giroux to leave him behind. Within minutes everybody else had cleared out. An empty arena. Stranded.

I saw Benjamin outside the dressing room. I asked to interview him. He explained he couldn't: Rabbi Baron wouldn't approve. He told me he didn't have a ride, so I gave him a lift -- otherwise he'd have been stuck there all day. Benjamin didn't read anything into it. Turned out to be a bad sign.

Gatineau had a home game against Prince Edward Island the next evening. When Benjamin made it to the dressing room he saw the roster: Rubin. A healthy scratch. First time that season. His parents had driven two hours up from Montreal , bringing his grandmother.

"We were all surprised when he didn't play," Claude Giroux says. "If he got a regular shift he could have been one of our better players."

Benjamin didn't know that he had played his last game for Gatineau .

Benoit Groulx always played the tough guy, an old-school hockey coach. One team, one set of rules, no distractions. Benjamin asked him why he was scratched. "You don't understand our system," Groulx said, implying that Benjamin would never have a place the system.

Benjamin didn't believe a word of it. He appreciated Charlie Henry for bringing him in but he also knew that the GM had no influence on the roster that coach filled out. "Groulx had it out for me," he says.

Groulx, now the coach of the Rochester Americans of the American Hockey League, insists there was no vendetta, no friction caused by either a clash of personalities or cultures. "It was just about hockey," Groulx says. "There were younger players I wanted to get ice time for."

Groulx denies that Benjamin's religious considerations-Kosher food and the need for help getting to and from the rink on the Shabbat-caused any distraction or factored in his decision to bench him. "We gave him a chance," he says.

When I asked Groulx about Benjamin being stranded at the arena, something that had everything but the coach's fingerprints on it, he again balks. "I don't know anything about that," he says. Claude Giroux, who was supposed to drive Benjamin back to his billets, declined to comment about the incident or Groulx's attitude to Benjamin.

Benjamin went to Erie of the Ontario junior league to get a look but he didn't dress. "What Benjamin needed was a lot of ice time," Erie 's general manager Sherry Bassin says. "We didn't have room. It was just a bad fit and the wrong tim e, too late in the season."

So Benjamin went home to Montreal and joined a Junior AAA team, scoring 11 goals in 18 games. Still, that was a level below major junior. It was even harder to take when Gatineau made it to the Memorial Cup.

*

Then came a break. New hope.

Last year an online video entrepreneur Farrell Miller bought the St John's Fog Devils to relocate the franchise in Montreal. It made a lot of sense-it's has always been hard to get your mind around the idea of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League not having a team in Montreal.

The move is bound to be good for QMJHL players. They're going to get seen by more NHL scouts and executives passing through Montreal.

The move seemed to be a godsend for Benjamin Rubin. Les Juniors de Montreal offered him a chance to play in his hometown. Sleeping in his own bed. Kosher food at home. Friends and family. When Benjamin scored Montreal 's first goal in their first home game in September it looked promising. Even more so when he had three goals in the first four games of the season.

Soon after, Angelo Esposito and other top draft picks rejoined the club after NHL training camps ended, bumping Benjamin down the roster. To be expected. The drafted kids are a priority. The club stands to get bucks back from the NHL when Esposito and others make the clubs' rosters.

When did it really go south? Benjamin missed a game on a long eastern road trip because of a High Holiday in October, but caught up with the team in Halifax and played three games in three nights -- couldn't have been that. The team struggled to score, shut out three times over 11 regular-season games -- more like a team failure than his. Fact is, though, Benjamin was a 19-year-old who had the game experience of a 17-year-old -- at an age when most Q leaguers have at least a couple of hundred games under their belts, he had played less than 60. They knew where to go. He didn't. Over-eager, he made mistakes going in to deep. Over-cautious, he hung back when he should have jumped up. He always knew he had to make up for lost time and the learning curve was going to be steep. The team, struggling to get into the playoffs, wanted or expected faster progress. "He has skill but his hockey sense doesn't match it," one NHL scout said. "You can see the player he might have been."

Then there was reasonable accommodation. When I let the management of les Juniors know that I was writing this story they threw up every imaginable roadblock. Les Juniors' public-relations secretary said the club "shouldn't look like it approves of [Judaism] or any religion." I told team owner Farrell Miller that I thought a story would let the public know about the tough choice that Benjamin had made to play. "We don't think it was a tough decision [to play for the team on the Shabbat]," Miller said. "It was an easy decision."

A surprising statement given that Miller himself is Jewish.

Soon after that discussion Benjamin was dropped down to the fourth line. A scrub. A few shifts a game. Not the best way for a 19-year-old to make up for lost time.

Then in December a breakthrough: Montreal was losing 2-0 on the road to les Cataractes de Shawinigan, the top-ranked junior team in Canada . Angelo Esposito was frustrated. "Play Rubin with me," Esposito told the coach Pascal Vincent.

The old saying goes: Players make the best scouts. The idea is that they have a better read on those they play with or against than a coach or general manager. No endorsement of Benjamin's talent comes with any more cred than Esposito's asking the coach to put him on the first line, especially when the team's star is struggling.

It was the way Benjamin always thought it should be. On the first line. With a friend, someone he grew up playing with and against. Les Juniors lost that game 4-2 to Shawinigan but Esposito scored twice and Benjamin picked up two assists. Next game at home les Juniors beat Shawinigan with Benjamin, skating on the first line, picking up his first goal since those first weeks of the season.

After that game Esposito left Montreal and joined the Canadian team at the world under-20s. Vincent immediately dropped Benjamin back down to the fourth line. "I thought I'd be playing with Angelo when he came back," Benjamin says.

It didn't happen. And that's where we came in.

That Saturday afternoon in early January, the team staged a ceremony to honor Esposito -- his first game back since he scored the winning goal in the world juniors' final. A standing ovation. Meanwhile Benjamin stood on the sidewalk, carrying his garbage bags. The deadline for Quebec league rosters was just hours off. No one was going to claim him. He'd end up trying to get released over to the Ontario league. Again too late. It was over.

"[Les Juniors] didn't give me a chance," Benjamin says. "They used me. They thought that having me on the team would sell tickets. Farrell Miller brought me into the team ... good for business with the Jewish community but maybe it didn't work out. He didn't stick up for me."

Farrell Miller, the owner, did not respond to a later request for an interview after Benjamin was released. Told of Benjamin's comments, coach Pascal Vincent also declined to take any questions about his former player. "I don't want to go there," he said. "I don't need to comment. If we have anything to say we will say it after the story comes out."

Hockey coaches don't value unity-they demand it. Probably more than coaches in other games. They don't suffer outsiders. Or at least they'll wait only so long for an outsider to get with their program, to blend in, to be "one of the boys." Try as he might, they did couldn't see Benjamin that way. Yeah, they would have accommodated an outsider if he had Sidney Crosby's talent, but he didn't. He was a middle-of-the-pack player, as good as many others in the league, with promise to be something more than that. In the end in Gatineau and Montreal, they held the door open for Benjamin-but only for so long.

There's no storybook ending here. Montreal is on to the QMJHL playoffs this week. Business as usual. Angelo Esposito is out for the season with a blown-out knee, unable to build on success at the world juniors. Sad, but he'll get another chance. Benjamin Rubin won't though. He has played his last junior game. If he ever plays another meaningful game, he doesn't know where it will be.

Some Orthodox Shomer Jews expect Benjamin to see the error of his ways. A friend of the Rubins, a Shomer Jew, even calls Rabbi Baron's dispensation "bulls---." One rabbi says that the door won't be shut to Benjamin but he must "express remorse and make a sincere verbal commitment not to transgress again."

Benjamin's not remorseful, just angry. "If I had played on the Shabbat when I started out in Quebec, I'd be a first-line player there now," he says. "I was making up for lost time from the start. My little brother David's going to be a player ... and he's playing on the Shabbat, so hopefully something good comes out of this."

Hopefully.