BC man gets a Quinn Hughes skate jersey thanks to Vancouver stranger

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David Kane crossed an ocean and a continent to play hockey — from his native Scotland to Vancouver — so a little meander around the city’s downtown to buy a black Canucks skate sweater for a complete stranger wasn’t much to ask.

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“I rollerbladed as a kid, but transitioned to ice when I moved here,” Kane said Thursday. “I moved to Canada because I always wanted to play hockey. When the opportunity of a job came up in 2019, I took it … I play four times a week, love it.”

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On Tuesday, his love of hockey and all things Canucks had him responding to a plea on Reddit to make Christmas a success for Melissa Bowie on Vancouver Island, who herself cheers for her beloved hometown Edmonton Oilers but whose husband Sean’s heart was set on getting a No. 43 black Canucks sweater with the skate logo and a ‘C’ to denote Quinn Hughes’ captaincy.

“I can’t seem to be able to find one anywhere (online)!” Melissa wrote. “Looking for 52 (large). Maybe there will be a Christmas miracle.”

“I saw the post, I was equally annoyed I couldn’t find this jersey online, so I decided to take matters into my own hands,” Kane said.

Employed in computer security, Kane works from home. The Canucks’ team store was only a 15-minute walk away, and the jersey was in stock. And more luck, as a season ticket-holder for the past three seasons, Kane also got a bit of a discount.

Finding a courier company without a lineup out the door or that was even open was a bit trickier, but Kane found success on his third try. Between the fee for overnight delivery of about $90 and the cost of the sweater, he was out almost $400 he couldn’t be certain he would get back.

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“I made peace with that,” Kane said. “If it turned out to be a scam, so be it, but it was better that on the off-chance it was a real situation the person got their jersey.”

He was also completely OK if Melissa Bowie, seeing the eye-popping delivery fee to get it to Nanaimo overnight, hesitated to reimburse him for that. However, she was more than delighted to pay him back for everything.

It was meant to be a Christmas gift, but when it arrived on her husband’s birthday, a week before Christmas, and she saw that Hughes’s number is 43, and that Sean was turning 43 that day, a birthday gift it became.

Melissa is a nurse working in harm reduction, her husband works in poverty reduction, they see a lot of those who get left behind. Add in today’s headlines or any cursory scroll through X, and the world can seem a dismal place.

“Lately I’ve been feeling pretty down, kind of, about humanity,” Sean Bowie said.

Sometimes it’s hard to maintain his “deeply held core belief that there’s more good and love in the world than the contrary.”

“Then here’s this completely selfless gesture on (Kane’s) part, like, he’d never met my wife or me, he went completely out of his way even though he had no way of knowing whether my wife could actually pay him.”

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Kane didn’t ask for money upfront, even said not to send any money until the jersey arrived.

“Really powerful gesture, that,” Sean said. “There are kind people in the world still who are willing to help a stranger. I hope sometime soon I get the opportunity to pay it forward.”

Melissa released a photograph of Sean on Reddit in his new Hughes sweater, and he looks grim.

“Honestly, he’s thrilled,” she said.

“I promise, I’m very, very happy,” Sean added. “It’s not by choice, it’s an unfortunate reality of who I am. I am very capable of smiling, but I’m not capable of smiling naturally, on cue, so I’m getting a lot of funny comments about how thrilled I look, which are entirely warranted.”

For Kane’s part, when he saw the photo, he “laughed so hard, I was like, ‘Yo, it looks like Quinn Hughes on the bench after he scores, you never know if the guy’s happy or sad.’”

gordmcintyre@postmedia.com

x.com/gordmcintyre

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