Please do not step back from the good this team does. Do not let this loss hollow out your community. Keep moving forward and celebrate the good in your community.

—Edinburgh, Toronto

Some things in this life are just far too difficult to bear alone, and grief for one’s own dead children is surely one of those things. So let us do whatever we can to let the heartbroken parents, families, friends and community where tragedies such as this unfold know that they are not alone.

—Peter S., Western Canada

All weekend since I read about the Broncos I’ve been listening to my two favorite men from Canada, men I love, men that soothe this aching world for me the most. Glenn Gould and Leonard Cohen. For the parents, life will never be the same. For the rest of us, it helps. Maybe.

—C.T., Austria

Trying out for this team was the highlight of my California-born and raised son’s hockey career. He didn’t make it, but seeing how the arena could fit the entire prairie town’s population was a great experience for him.

We are all part of each other, particularly when a niche sport is involved where kids from all over the world compete to have the opportunity to be on these teams. Coach Darcy recruited my son in Las Vegas to go to Humboldt. It’s pretty jarring to know that the person who was picked instead of you to be a defenseman is now dead or injured.

—Joan, Santa Barbara, Calf.

Jerome Jackson, a reader in Oxon Hill, Maryland who said he is part of “a big hockey family” emailed a moving poem about Humboldt’s sorrow:

The winds across the grain

Of Saskatchewan

Flow swiftly forever on.

No one can be numb

To the dying of the young.