People doing good · Sports

Stanley Cup pays a visit to a girl with leukemia

Bob CollinsBob Collins Jun 18, 2017
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Here’s your daily dose of sweetness:

The Stanley Cup has had a busy week since the Pittsburgh Penguins won it — again — a week ago.

Everyone on the team gets to spend a day with it. It goes boating, and hits a few bars, maybe a school or two.

Penguins equipment manager Danny Kroll had a more worthwhile trip for it.

It went to Darran Dunlap’s house on Saturday. She’s the six-year-old daughter of a friend with whom Kroll once worked at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette newspaper.

At the start of the season, she was diagnosed with leukemia.

Her dad, Colin, “lost it”, the Post Gazette says.

“I haven’t cried a lot through all of this,” he explained. “Your kid looks up to you. In order for them to stay strong, you have to stay strong. The diagnosis was one thing. You think, ‘We can’t change this. Let’s see how we’re going to beat it.’

“Weekly they put a 1-inch needle right in her chest with medicine in it. That never gets regular. You never get used to that. But you can kind of get numb to it. I’ve gotten away from crying in that moment. I’ve gotten away from knowing that’s abnormal; that’s just what it takes.

“The Stanley Cup’s iconic. It’s something that a lot of people celebrate. It walks up on your porch, and you think, ‘This means a lot to a lot of people.’ You can’t really help but lose it a little bit considering the joy it brought her.

“It means something to Sidney Crosby. It means something to Marc-Andre Fleury. It means something to a little girl who’s 6 who has cancer. It means something to everybody.”

“That’s a guy who, selfishly, could have went with his buddies and had a bunch of beers sitting out on his deck or whatever, and he chose to share it with some little kid with cancer,” Colin said. “That means a lot.”

The kid’s got the heart of a champion, evidenced by this tweet from her dad last December.