Bob Mason is the longest-serving coach in all of Minnesota pro sports, and it’s a very specialized role.

Instead of focusing on all 23 Minnesota Wild players, Mason has two or three pupils who need specific coaching and maybe, most importantly, a shoulder to lean on.

For 16 years, Victoria Mason lived that Wild coaching ride with her husband, the team’s goalie coach since 2002.

If Manny Fernandez, Dwayne Roloson or Niklas Backstrom were in a slump, if Josh Harding or Darcy Kuemper were showing signs of youth, if Devan Dubnyk would give up a goal that maybe he’d want back, Victoria would always be the one to alleviate Bob’s stress when perhaps the GM and head coach were demanding answers or venting frustration.

“She was a little more sympathetic,” Mason said, laughing hard, Tuesday. “She lived that goalie world with me for 36 years ever since my days at (the University of Minnesota) Duluth and the Olympic team, so she knew you’d have to turn the page, get over it.

“She’d always say, ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be better next game.’”

Mason’s voice suddenly cracked as he tried to convey the sudden silence and emptiness inside his Bloomington home.

“Like last night, I came home from the Nashville game, and it’s the first time I came home from a game when my wife’s not here,” Mason said. “I was thinking about that from the moment I got in my car at the Xcel Center until I got in my garage here. I was always excited to get home to see her. She didn’t go to the games. So, she’d watch it, and we’d talk about it.”

“Yeah,” Mason said, “a big part of my life will be gone there.”

Mason knows he’ll be dealing with a roller coaster of emotions for some time.

His rock, Victoria — his beloved wife of 28 years, the love of his life since 1983, and his best friend for four decades — died last Monday less than two years after being diagnosed with Stage 4 urothelial cancer.

She was only 61.

“You’re never ready for the end,” Mason said. “When she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, it was almost the same as the day she died. It’s overwhelming. You try to prepare yourself a little bit … but when it happens, it’s pretty raw.”

Mason first met Victoria Weis, who grew up in Austin, Minn., in 1979.

Going to junior college in Bob’s hometown of International Falls, Victoria became friends with Mason’s older sister, Nancy, and worked at their father Don Mason’s men’s and women’s clothing store.

Fast forward four years, and Mason was a sophomore goalie for the Bulldogs. His twin brother, Billy, also played for the Bulldogs. During one weekend where UMD played the University of North Dakota, a bunch of people, including teammate Tom Kurvers, planned to go out after the game to Grandma’s Saloon.

“It was a setup,” said Kurvers, today one of the Wild’s assistant GMs.

Set up in college, Bob and Victoria Mason hit it off. “They were just a perfect match,” says Tom Kurvers, the Wild’s assistant GM and a longtime friend of the Masons. (Courtesy Bob Mason)

Billy’s girlfriend was a cheerleader for UND, and Victoria was working at Norwest Bank in the Twin Cities at the time. She was single, so Nancy invited Victoria up to Duluth for the January 1983 outing because “Bob was the only one that didn’t have a date.”

For the next eight years, they became inseparable.

After that year at Duluth, Mason moved on to the 1984 Olympic team, which luckily enough trained in Minneapolis.

Victoria and Bob started dating and hit it off quickly. She would become a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines, where she’d work for 23 years. The job had its perks: She could visit Bob as his NHL career took off in Washington, Quebec, Chicago and ultimately Vancouver.

“They were just a perfect match,” said Kurvers, a groomsman at their June 15, 1991, wedding. “Yeah … these last two years have been real hard to watch.”

Victoria started not to feel well in the winter of 2016.

She had issues with her kidneys and her urinary tract. She was first mistakenly diagnosed with diverticulitis, an inflammation in the walls in the intestines. But in March of 2017, a spot was found on one of Victoria’s lungs.

On the road in Chicago with the Wild, Mason rushed home.

The nodule was found to be benign.

But that news became horror when two months later blood showed up in Victoria’s urine. The spot in the lung was still there. A biopsy was performed, and that now bigger spot came back malignant and worse more had spread from her ureter.

“It was devastating,” Mason said. “I mean, it just wasn’t really caught. She had symptoms, and I believe there was an 11-month window there to catch it. And then to find out that it wasn’t even Stage 1, 2 or 3, that it was 4, it was just crushing. I mean, you trust your doctors and you trust their opinions.”

Victoria Mason, during a treatment. “There’s hope, and then worriedness, and you run that gamut of hope to being deathly worried, and you hit it all,” Bob Mason says. (Courtesy Bob Mason)

Months of chemotherapy did not eliminate the cancer. Last summer, she started an immunotherapy drug.

“It’s been a tough road,” Mason said. “Lots of treatments. Lot of treatments worked. That gives you a little hope and a little excitement. The chemo can beat the heck out of you. So, there’s hope, and then worriedness, and you run that gamut of hope to being deathly worried, and you hit it all. I felt it. I could barely talk about it.”

This past season, Mason has been away from the Wild on and off as he cared for his wife. Earlier this month, the Wild essentially “called up” their minor-league goalie coach, Frédéric Chabot, to work with Dubnyk and Alex Stalock.

“I wanted to be here for her,” Mason said. “We were together for 36 years. I didn’t miss too many chemo sessions. I just felt very obligated to be with her and to comfort her. We didn’t have any kids. We had each other. So I wanted to be with her.”

A month ago, Mason attended a Gophers game against Notre Dame with general manager Paul Fenton to scout goalie Mat Robson.

Fenton, Mason and a couple scouts took Robson and his parents out for dinner, then Mason returned home.

His wife was complaining that her breathing was strained.

The next day, the Wild were playing the St. Louis Blues. Mason returned home and found Victoria still in bed, struggling to breathe.

He rushed her to the emergency room and it was determined that she contracted pneumonia during a chemo session the week prior. Because of her comprised immune system, it took more than a week for the antibiotics to make Victoria feel better.

Afterward, she wasn’t out of the woods. She suddenly had flank pain where the cancer was. Scans showed further growth of the tumors. Because Victoria was so weak, doctors felt like another treatment wouldn’t be beneficial until she got stronger.

But that time never came.

The last few weeks were tough as Mason and his wife had to seriously discuss death.

“It was hard to talk about,” Mason said through tears. “There’s a lot of, I don’t know if it’s denial … I didn’t want her to leave, she didn’t want to leave. She was too young. She wanted to stay around and live some more.

“It was a really tough topic to discuss, but I think she found some peace with some really good people at the hospital who talked to her. She started getting calmer and a little more relaxed about it the last week to 10 days maybe.

“But it was a tough decision to put her in hospice care. I wrestled with that for about a week. You do the hospice care, you’re kind of looking at the end, so I struggled. But we got her home for about five days. At first, she didn’t want to come home. I think she was just scared to leave the hospital, that maybe she thought that was kind of the end coming. Finally, she said, ‘I want to come home.’”

Victoria was “one of a kind,” Mason said, laughing at the memory.

She had a tremendous sense of humor, something she displayed last November at Xcel Energy Center when Victoria poured water from Rainy Lake in International Falls onto “Our Ice.”

After, Victoria dabbed some of that water on each side of her neck like it was perfume.

“She was witty, unique, and people remembered her,” Mason, 57, said. “They just never forgot her once they met her. Smart. She was unbelievably smart. She had a great mind. She loved to have fun. She loved to laugh. She loved to comfort people. She just so much loved to comfort people.”

Victoria was a gourmet cook and adored cooking using homegrown herbs. It was hard the last couple years because the chemotherapy took her sense of taste away.

“She loved music. She loved old movies, black and white movies,” Mason said. “She would just sit there and watch. I’d say, ‘I’ll watch a little bit, but I probably won’t get the whole movie in with you.’”

As a flight attendant — she even chartered the Wild during their early years — Victoria’s job took her to far off places like Asia and Europe. She began to collect antiques and became an expert in mid-century and vintage jewelry. For years, she was in malls in the Twin Cities selling her antiques. In fact, in 2003, Manny Fernandez bought his engagement ring from Victoria.

“When she was flying, she was always bringing in different inventory from different cities,” Mason said. “She just had an eye for antique jewelry. I’d travel with her during my offseasons, and as soon as we’d check into a hotel, we’d be off to some antique shop in whatever city we were in.

“And … she loved her dogs.”

Over the years, the Masons have had three 50-pound standard poodles.

“It was one reason I tried to get her home … so she could see her dogs again,” Mason said. “I never thought I’d have a poodle, but she had a couple when growing up, so I bought her one in the ‘90s and she just loved them.”

Dogs are intuitive, and Mason believes their poodles, Margot and Bleu, understood in the end how dire the situation was with Victoria.

“They were hanging tight to Victoria right to the end,” Mason said.

On March 18, Victoria passed away peacefully with friends at her side.

Victoria was preceded in death by her parents, Gloria and John Weis. Besides Bob, Victoria is survived by her sisters Mari and Barb and brothers John and Charlie, mother-in-law, Pam, sister-in-law Nancy and brothers-in-law Billy and Jim.

Mason specifically wanted to thank Wild team doctor Sheldon Burns, who was a great help the past two years, as well as the doctors and nurses who took care of Victoria at Minnesota Oncology and the nurses in the oncology ward at Fairview Hospital “who treated Victoria unbelievable.”

Because of the hockey season, Mason is waiting to host a Celebration of Life to honor his wife. It’ll occur after the regular season and what he hopes is right near the start of the Wild playoffs.

For now, he’s penciling in Friday, April 12.

Because the Masons have no children and his siblings live 300 miles away, Mason was asked who his support system will be.

He didn’t hesitate.

The first names that rolled off his tongue were Kurvers and his wife, Heather, Wild assistant coach Darby Hendrickson and his wife, Dana, and director of player personnel Andrew Brunette, who have been there for him every step of the way.

He has received countless phone calls, having some great conversations with former goalies like Roloson and former Wild coach Jacques Lemaire and former Wild assistant coach Mario Tremblay.

“And our coaching staff has been fantastic supporting me,” Mason said.

Last Wednesday, two days after Victoria died, Kurvers arranged a dinner for Mason at Lou Nanne’s Tavern23 in Edina. Sixteen people including Fenton, other members of the front office, the coaches and their wives dined with Mason.

There were lots of needed laughs and stories told.

“It was just nice to see Mase talking, and I think being around friends was probably a good thing,” coach Bruce Boudreau said.

Mason returned to work Monday. As difficult as life is right now for him, Mason plans to fly to Vegas and Arizona for this weekend’s upcoming road trip.

Being around the staff, being around Dubnyk and Stalock, will be a good way to keep his mind off the sorrow.

“This whole ride, me playing and coaching, Victoria’s lived that life and enjoyed it,” Mason said. “And she’d want me to get up and keep doing it. She loved the hockey, she loved the excitement of it. Hopefully, I don’t have to drag myself out of bed. Hopefully, I’m just going to remember this is what she’d want me to do, to be strong, to do what I love and, as much as I miss her and always will … to keep doing it.”

(Top photo of Bob and Victoria Mason: Courtesy Bob Mason)