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across that frozen field to his home with nothing on his mind but an overwhelming sense of relief at still being alive.
    â€œThat’s all I thought about,” Campbell said. “I was alive. It was kind of exciting. I was just happy to be alive.”
    Campbell walked up to his house—to the side garage door, actually. He was standing there, now trembling, soaking wet and frozen, vainly trying to recall and punch in the security code to open the garage door. As he fumbled with the keypad, he could hear Heather, who was putting garbage in the garage from an inside door leading to the house. Campbell started banging on the garage door and yelling to get her attention. She came over, hit the automatic opener and couldn’t believe what she saw when the door opened: her husband standing there, rivulets of blood all over his head and face, wet and frozen.
    â€œAt first, because of the blood, she thought I had been attacked by coyotes,” Campbell said.
    Many a man, having been through such a traumatic physical ordeal with exposure to ice-cold water, bitterly cold winter weather and quite likely hypothermia, to say nothing of nearly drowning with dirty pond water filling his lungs, would have gone to the hospital for medical attention. But Campbell possessed a hockey player’s mentality and farmer’s stubborn streak. Besides, it was a workday.
    All he wanted, once he got into the house, was a long—very long—hot shower. And, practical man that he is, he wanted to make arrangements to get the tractor hauled out of the pond.
    Campbell spent a good half hour in a steaming hot shower, doing nothing, he said, but luxuriating in the “sheer joy of breathing.” A doctor friend who lived in the area did drop by the house later that day, but aside from taking some Advil, Campbell seemed to be okay. Mind you, as the day wore on, he lost his voice, leaving him with just a hoarse whisper. And by that evening, he had tremendous lower-back and rib pain, which turned out to be a nasty kidney infection from ingesting the dirty pond water.
    But the NHL schedule waits for no man, not even one who almost drowned at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon. By seven o’clock that night, NHL games were being played. And in Campbell’s world, that meant the next issue or controversy was only a puck drop away.
    Right on cue, in the second period of the New Jersey Devils–Tampa Bay Lightning game at the Prudential Center in Newark that night, the lights unexpectedly went out. A circuit breaker blew, and the computers controlling the lights in the arena were damaged and couldn’t be repaired. There was a delay of more than an hour and 40 minutes.
    For much of that time, there was great uncertainty as to how the league could, would or should proceed, all initially exacerbated by the inability of many to get hold of the league’s senior executive VP and director of hockey operations. Campbell’s cell phone was still at the bottom of the pond in the big, orange Kubota. (As an aside, Campbell said when the tractor was pulled out of the pond, he got the cell phone back, dried it out for a day or two, and it worked like a charm. Even his cell phone had a knack for survival.)
    No rest for the weary. Campbell had no choice but to be back at work, using his landline to consult with his right-hand man, Mike Murphy, in Toronto.
    â€œWe felt the teams could not continue playing,” Colin Campbell was later quoted as saying in the newspapers in New York City and northern New Jersey. “We tried for an hour and [42] minutes to restore power and appropriate lighting but were left with no alternative but to postpone further play for the evening.”
    Campbell could have added: “Oh, I came within a breath of dying today.” He didn’t, of course.
    After the fact, it bothered Campbell that his tractor had crashed through the ice at all. He’d been careful, he thought. With the extended