Even in the midst of relentlessly gloomy days, Bo Horvat would arrive at the rink with a story to tell. He knew his job was to give some hope, some life, to the Vancouver Canucks ’ ambitions, even if in the moment they weren’t winning.

This is all for something, this is a thing we have to learn. There’s a purpose to all of this, he’d say.

And he did this even before he was named captain in 2019. He spent a whole year as the informal leader of the Canucks, practising for an obvious future as the man who wore the C.

He did get to learn at the side of the greatest Canucks captain of them all. And Henrik Sedin learned from Markus Naslund, who learned from Mark Messier and Trevor Linden. Linden learned from Stan Smyl. And so on.

There was a thread. Many of those years weren’t easy and yet

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