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When the Ottawa Redblacks won the Grey Cup on Nov. 27, their biggest supporter saluted them with a glass of rye from his Civic Hospital bed.

“I knew they were going to do it,” said Harold Moore, to his family.

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How could they not? That very day, Harold turned 85. Two weeks later, Harold left us. The bowel cancer first diagnosed eight years ago had returned a second time, and had spread to his liver.

He went out on top, after waiting 40 years for an Ottawa football team to be champs again. As he passed on at the Embassy West Hospice, Harold’s precious granddaughter, Samantha, slipped a farewell note into his hands. Hospice staff respectfully draped a Canadian flag over him, a fitting honour for one of Ottawa’s most devoted sons, a military man, a champion nonpareil for the cause of cystic fibrosis.

For Harold, CF had hit close to home. A former neighbour had five children, three of them stricken with CF.