The Zamboni Doesn’t Stop for Grief, But Maybe It Should
The ice was fresh. The blades were sharp. And somewhere between the blue lines of a Rhode Island hockey rink, Colin Dorgan found himself holding a state championship trophy exactly one month after that same ice had been stained by the kind of violence that usually ends seasons rather than defines them.
This is not a story about healing. Not really.
What happened in the early hours of this breaking news cycle—when ESPN, CBS News, and Boston.com simultaneously pushed notifications about Blackstone Valley Co-op’s improbable Rhode Island state title—is something far more complicated than the standard sports redemption narrative we’ve been trained to consume. Yes, Dorgan, serving the unusual dual role of player and coach for this co-operative high school squad, led his team to victory. Yes, the win came weeks after a deadly shooting transformed their home rink from sanctuary to crime scene. But to reduce this to a simple arc of tragedy-to-triumph is to miss the jagged, uncomfortable reality of what it means to play through trauma.
The Timeline That Sports Refused to Pause
Let’s be specific about the compression here, because the details matter. The shooting at the Blackstone Valley hockey rink occurred approximately one month ago—roughly four weeks, or several dozen practices, or exactly one high school hockey season’s worth of games. In the calculus of grief, this is nothing. In the calculus of a state tournament, it’s everything.
The championship victory didn’t wait for the community to process. The puck dropped on schedule. Colin Dorgan and his teammates had to make a choice that no teenager should have to make: whether to honor their grief by stopping, or by continuing. They chose the ice. They chose the game. They chose, perhaps unconsciously, to give the national media a story that fits neatly into trending news cycles—one where athletic triumph papers over bullet holes.
But here’s what the headlines from ESPN and CBS News won’t capture in their breaking updates: the silence between periods. The looks in the locker room. The way a goal celebration might feel like betrayal one moment and defiance the next. Dorgan, as both a player lacing up his skates and a coach drawing up plays, carried a dual burden that no amount of sports psychology could fully address. He wasn’t just trying to win a title; he was trying to prove that the space where they practiced could still be safe, still be sacred, still be theirs.
Why We Need This Win to Mean More Than It Does
There’s a particular hunger in American culture right now for stories like this one. We are desperate for evidence that communities can absorb gun violence and emerge intact, that the next generation is resilient enough to skate over the cracks in our collective armor. Colin Dorgan’s face, triumphant on the ice, offers a visual antidote to the surveillance footage and police tape we’ve grown accustomed to.
And that desperation should make us uncomfortable.
Because the counterargument here is sharp and necessary: Are we asking too much of these kids? When we celebrate this championship as a “triumph over tragedy,” do we inadvertently place the burden of community healing on the shoulders of eighteen-year-olds who should be worrying about college applications, not carrying the emotional weight of a town’s processing? The Blackstone Valley Co-op didn’t just win a hockey game; they performed resilience for a national audience hungry for proof that everything will be okay.
What if everything isn’t okay? What if the win is just a win—beautiful, hard-earned, and ultimately separate from the trauma that preceded it?
The coverage from Boston.com and other outlets frames this as a “significant emotional milestone,” and perhaps it is. But milestones mark distance traveled, not destinations reached. The community is still grieving. The rink still echoes. The championship banner will hang forever next to the memory of a day when the ice wasn’t safe.
The Dual Role Nobody’s Examining
Lost in the trending updates and the breaking news alerts is a peculiar detail about Colin Dorgan himself: he occupies the rare hybrid position of player-coach. In high school hockey, this is almost unheard of. It suggests a maturity beyond his years, certainly, but it also suggests a bridging—between the adult world of authority and the adolescent world of experience.
This matters because it reframes how we understand leadership in crisis. Dorgan wasn’t just a captain rallying the troops; he was a coach making tactical decisions while simultaneously processing his own trauma as a member of the community. When he stepped onto the ice for the state final, he wasn’t just representing Blackstone Valley Co-op; he was modeling how to function when functioning feels impossible.
But here’s what nobody’s talking about: the long-term cost of that modeling.
We celebrate the “return to normal” that this championship represents, but we rarely interrogate what “normal” demands of young people in the aftermath of violence. The season didn’t pause for therapy. The tournament brackets didn’t wait for anniversaries of the shooting to pass. Dorgan and his teammates had to compartmentalize at an age when emotional integration is the developmental task at hand. They had to be heroes before they had the chance to be healed.
What happens when the ESPN cameras leave and the trending topics shift? What happens in the quiet of next season, when the ice is just ice again, cold and empty and full of memory?
The Geography of Violence and Victory
There’s something particularly disorienting about violence invading a hockey rink. These are spaces designed for controlled aggression, for sanctioned violence within strict boundaries. When real violence breaches those boards—when the glass that protects spectators from pucks can’t protect them from bullets—the fundamental contract of sports is broken.
Blackstone Valley Co-op’s victory doesn’t repair that contract. It can’t. But it does reassert the terms of engagement: We will come back. We will play here. We will not let this space be defined by what happened on the worst day.
Is that bravery or denial? The answer is probably both, existing simultaneously like overlapping circles on a Venn diagram of trauma response. Colin Dorgan and his teammates aren’t therapists or politicians or grief counselors. They’re hockey players. And perhaps the most honest thing they could do was to play hockey—not as a statement, not as a healing ritual, but because the season demanded it and the ice was there and the game, against all odds, still felt like joy.
Where the Story Goes From Here
The danger of moments like this—when breaking news converges with sports triumph and community trauma—is that they become frozen in amber. We will remember Colin Dorgan holding that trophy. We will forget, or never learn, how he slept in the weeks following the championship. We will celebrate the resilience without investigating the cost of being resilient.
But maybe that’s the lesson we actually need, however uncomfortable it makes us. Not that sports heal all wounds, but that life continues in its ordinary extraordinariness even when wounds are still fresh. The Zamboni does keep running. The seasons do keep changing. The puck does keep dropping.
Blackstone Valley Co-op won a state title. A community continues to grieve. These truths coexist without canceling each other out, and our insistence that one must resolve the other says more about our own anxiety than about the reality of recovery.
Colin Dorgan will graduate, or has graduated, or will move on to whatever comes next after you’ve held a trophy in one hand and a town’s grief in the other. The rink will host games next season. New players will skate over the same ice where tragedy and triumph now layer like sedimentary rock.
And perhaps that’s the only honest ending available: not redemption, not closure, but continuation. The game goes on because it must, not because it fixes anything. The ice remains, scarred and sacred, waiting for the next puck drop.
We would do well to remember that winning and healing are different verbs entirely—and that expecting one to accomplish the work of the other is a burden no championship, however hard-earned, was designed to carry.
