Owen Brady went for a skate in late June.Nothing out of the ordinary. Some warm-up strides around the net, a few passes from good friend and mentor Paul Ranger, the former Maple Leafs defenceman. Some drills with the puck, a few drills without it. And that was it. Things that the 16-year-old Brady, a highly touted defenceman long before the recent Ontario Hockey League draft, has done hundreds, if not thousands of times.But with Brady’s hockey story — his life story — taking so many twists the last eight months, that skate represented the world to him.It was last November when Brady, six-foot-four, 190 pounds and the captain of the Whitby Wildcats AAA minor midgets, was told he had osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer and the same type of cancer that Terry Fox had.The next several months took the strapping teenager down a path of surgeries, chemotherapy and painstaking physiotherapy. But Brady is on the comeback trail. He has had the love and support of his parents — Chris and Deirdre Brady — his friends and the community, including the likes of Ranger, who went through his own nightmare dealing with depression.The skate was just an early step in Brady’s comeback. There’s more chemo ahead but, if his body responds as expected, that should end sometime in August. The end goal is to get back on the ice and enjoy the game again, and to show all that promise people were talking about before his diagnosis. He was thought to be a first-round talent in the OHL; the local team, the Oshawa Generals, selected him in the sixth.“Short term, just to progress slowly and be conscious of my leg so I don’t hurt it, positive progress,” Brady said of his goals. “In the long term, just to get back to playing at full game speed, hopefully with Oshawa Generals.”One day last week, Brady had just finished another round of chemo and was back in his room at the Hospital for Sick Children. He didn’t feel like tal ...
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