SPRINGFIELD - On February 23, Mike McKenna sat in the Springfield Thunderbirds' boardroom, rattling off the names of the teams he had played for over the previous 12 years.

The list of 14 cities ran from Las Vegas to Norfolk, Virginia to Portland, Maine, with a few repeats. There were trips to NHL clubs, including New Jersey, Columbus, Arizona and Tampa Bay (not counting preseason stops in Ottawa and St. Louis). The list did not yet include Syracuse, and while McKenna had crossed the country multiple times in the name of hockey, he had never been traded, always moving as a free agent.

Six days later, the message came: McKenna would leave the Thunderbirds that day, March 1, to join the Syracuse Crunch. He'd been traded -- a one-for-one swap with goalie Adam Wilcox -- for the first time in his life.

The news surprised McKenna, though in an abstract sense, the trade fit right into a run of milestones.

On Feb. 19, he had earned his 200th AHL win, becoming the 15th goalie and the first American ever to reach that mark. He followed that with a 32-save shutout in his next game. In between, he left his mark in Springfield's food scene, winning the "Thunderburger Live Cooking Challenge" with a burger that Plan B Springfield will add to its menu.

The trade also came one week after the younger of McKenna's two daughters, Adeline, turned one year old. Of those constant moves to new homes, most had come before McKenna and his wife, Rachel, had kids.

On an uncommonly young Thunderbirds team, the McKennas were one of just three families with children. They often had dinner with the other two families - those of Paul Thompson and Brent Regner - and their kids played together. When the McKennas told their three-year-old daughter, Kenlin, that they were moving, she cried, reluctant to leave her new friends - not to mention Thunderbirds mascot Boomer, to whom she'd become attached.

"It kind of gets to you a little bit, because you're noticing that (Kenlin) is picking up on this stuff more," Rachel said.

As Rachel spoke about the impending move, Adeline sat on her lap, picking through a cup of Cheerios. Kenlin, who will turn four in May, sat nearby, eating a cookie decorated as a blue butterfly and working through a coloring book - a moment of calm amid the rush to pack up their lives and move again.

'Maybe we'd go to Europe for a year or two to play, and then he'd be done'

McKenna was 18 the first time he moved across the country for hockey. A St. Louis native, he was playing for the Springfield Junior Blues in Illinois when St. Lawrence University noticed him.

Located in Canton, N.Y., St. Lawrence sits about twenty miles from the Canadian border. McKenna loved the school right away, and he played four years of college hockey there while majoring in economics.

He and Rachel - a native of Queensbury, N.Y. - met in an Intro to Canadian Studies class at St. Lawrence. Rachel's family had season tickets for the AHL's Adirondack Red Wings, which played in nearby Glens Falls, when she was growing up, so minor-league hockey was already part of her life.

Mike's first pro contract after college brought him to the ECHL's Las Vegas Wranglers, and the couple moved west, looking forward to a few years of travel and new adventures.

"He thought that, when he started in Las Vegas as a free agent, he'd maybe get a couple of years there, maybe we'd go to Europe for a year or two to play, and then he'd be done," Rachel said. "And it would be maybe five years of our lives, just to kind of experience it and be done."

At the start of the 2007-08 season, a week after the McKennas had moved two carloads of their belongings to Las Vegas, Mike got a call from the AHL's Portland Pirates. He had been summoned east again.

He had to leave immediately, while Rachel packed everything back up and made the 45-hour drive from Las Vegas to Maine.

When a player is traded or signed midseason, he typically leaves to join his new team right away. For his wife or girlfriend, the work begins then: finding options for housing in a new city and sending recommendations for her husband or boyfriend to check out, since she can't move the rest of their belongings to a new place if there is no new place yet.

If the couple has children, the details multiply: enrolling the kids in a new school, setting up doctors' appointments, transferring medical records, ensuring that their new neighborhood provides places for the kids to play. This year, the McKennas had hoped to start Kenlin in preschool, but with the family in the midst of moving again this past fall, she'll start next year instead.

So as challenging as that cross-country move to Portland was in 2007, it could have been even more complicated if it had come later in Mike's career.

"I don't know how I would have done that if we had kids. It was just me at the time," Rachel said, adding with a laugh, "(Mike) always says, 'When she did that and stayed with me, I knew that she could handle anything."

Facing Sidney Crosby - and even more nerve-wracking NHL moments

McKenna's first, and longest yet, stint in the NHL came in the 2008-09 season with the Tampa Bay Lightning. He debuted in relief on Feb. 3 in New York, but the reality of the NHL hit the next night at the Mellon Arena, when he earned his first big-league start.

"The next night we played in Pittsburgh, and full house, white-out, in the Igloo, and the first shot's a 2-on-1 with (Sidney) Crosby," McKenna said. "That was truly my 'welcome to the NHL' moment."

The next game, on Feb. 7, brought his best hockey memory to date -- his first NHL win and shutout, in Tampa, with Rachel and his parents in attendance. On Nov. 10, 2010, the New Jersey Devils gave McKenna another indelible memory: his first start in St. Louis, his hometown, against the Blues.

As he walked into the Scottrade Center, McKenna felt overwhelmed thinking of his grandfather, Bill. In the 1960s, Bill helped found the Kirkwood Youth Hockey Association, at a time when St. Louis youth hockey was in its infancy. He also served as an off-ice official for the Blues, who began play in 1967, as did Mike's father, Terry.

Bill played minor-league baseball, but wished he'd had the chance to play competitive hockey instead, Mike said. Terry McKenna also played college baseball and competed in auto racing, but he played on the first youth hockey team in St. Louis - underscoring how new the area's hockey infrastructure is, compared to longtime hotbeds like New England and the upper Midwest.

That family history is important to Mike, who skates on a men's league team with his father in the summers. So starting a game in St. Louis, while memorable, was not a relaxing experience.

"It was the most nerve-wracking game I've ever played in my life," McKenna said. "I didn't sleep the night before, the day of. Had a near breakdown walking in the building, because I at one point thought of my grandpa, who was an off-ice official there and an official scorer, and passed away years in advance. But for some reason it came into my head, man, what if Grandpa saw this?"

McKenna is now one of more than a dozen St. Louis products to make the NHL. He's proud of that heritage, and thinks often of his grandfather's role in propelling him, and many other players from the area, to the professional ranks.

"If he found out that we had over a dozen guys that have played NHL hockey from St. Louis, well over a dozen, and a guy's won a Stanley Cup and everything, he'd be the happiest man on earth," McKenna said of his grandfather. "He played minor league baseball, and I remember him telling me one day that if he knew hockey could have been this much fun, he would have never chased that little white ball around."

Home on the water in Portland

In Portland, Mike and Rachel found a city that felt like home for the first time. Mike had played there in the 2007-08 season, so returning to the Pirates in 2014 was an easy transition - even with a newborn Kenlin.

The 2014-15 and 2015-16 seasons marked the first time since 2007 that Mike had played the bulk of two straight seasons in the same city. The sense of home ran deeper than that, though, as they enjoyed Portland's culture and community. During this year's All-Star break, the McKennas went back to visit Portland.

"The last two years, we were in a house on the water," Rachel said. "We would see seals and bald eagles and everything daily from our front window. And the city itself - the food scene is kind of a big thing with Mike and I. We love to go out to eat and try new things, and the food scene there has exploded in the last few years."

When the Pirates were sold to Springfield in the spring of 2016, the return to another familiar area was nice - Mike had played for the Springfield Falcons in the 2013-14 season.

But this past spring, for the first time, Kenlin was old enough to miss a place in Portland that had become home for her, too.

"We had just found out the day we were moving that the team wasn't going back," Rachel said. "So we were not able to prepare (Kenlin) for not going back to Portland. It was suddenly like, 'We're leaving. 'OK, when do we come back?' 'We're not.' And so she cried and was sad about it.

"She still asks sometimes, 'Can we go home to where the seals are?'"

In the wake of this month's trade, Syracuse is a fortunate landing spot for the McKennas in a few ways. It's a return to the Tampa Bay organization, which gave Mike his NHL debut. Rachel's brother also lives in Syracuse, and her parents live about two hours from the city.

Whether they'll spend a few months or a few years in Syracuse remains to be seen. As the kids grow, the logistics of moving will only get tougher, adding wrinkles to a process Mike and Rachel know well.

Settling down in St. Louis

The McKennas may not know where they'll be living next year, or the year after, but they have a plan for life after Mike retires. They'll live full-time in St. Louis, where they now live in the offseason.

Rachel, who has a math degree from St. Lawrence, may work as a substitute teacher or a tutor. Mike would like to stay in the hockey world, although his path will depend on the opportunities available when he does retire from playing.

"Front office is what I would love to do, there's no doubt about it," Mike said. "It's just difficult to get your foot in the door in those (jobs), because there's so few of them available. And quite truthfully, a lot of those people played a lot of years in the NHL, and I don't have that right now. So who knows? I'd love to, but again, it's all about opportunities."

McKenna is 33, though he could pass for younger, apart from the hint of gray in his beard. He offers teams both a steady hand in goal and a veteran presence that's rare at the AHL level. He's been involved with the Professional Hockey Players' Association - the AHL and ECHL players' union - for much of his career.

While he fields questions about hockey at times, younger players more often ask for guidance on issues away from the rink.

"When it comes to health care and certain things that we're allowed in our CBA, that's when I get really poignant questions that are very direct," McKenna said. "And health care is a huge portion of that. We have such a convoluted system compared to what our players are used to. They come from Canada, they come from Europe, they come from places where health care is a social given. This is, like I say, a mind-numbingly complex thing for them.

"So they need help with it, and even the kids that are American, they're 20 years old and they've never dealt with this before."

While he may stay in hockey as a career, McKenna's interests away from the ice are familiar to anyone who follows him on Twitter. He's a music fan, a mountain biker and a cook.

Brent Regner, the Thunderbirds' captain, said McKenna might have been more nervous before the ThunderBurger cook-off than he gets before games. (The burger McKenna came up with to win the competition was a beef patty topped with tangy maple-shallot-date jam, sharp white cheddar, bacon, baby arugula and roasted garlic aioli on a butter toasted Kaiser roll.)

"Let me tell you, he was serious about cooking that burger," Regner said. "He really enjoys that type of stuff, the cooking part of things, and he is one guy that if you're going to a new place, or an away game or something and you're staying the night before, he's always the guy looking up which restaurant to go to in the next city.

"He always tries to find a nice, unique restaurant. He hates when guys order chicken parm."

While moving with a young family presents challenges, Mike and Rachel are grateful for the opportunities hockey has brought. For Mike, the connections he's made through social media with fans, or new friends in the food or music businesses, have been an unexpected benefit.

Before college, Rachel had never traveled further west than Buffalo. Now, not only has she explored a new city almost every year, she's made friends from all parts of the world.

"I think I can empathize with people and things going on in the world more now, because I feel like I no longer just have my narrow view of how things are," Rachel said. "Because it's the life I've lived - I've now met so many people who have led completely different lives in completely different places. And I think that's just kind of an education I didn't expect to get, in a way, to learn about the world that I never would have been able to, had it not been for hockey."

Closing the book on Springfield (again)

The second chapter of McKenna's time in Springfield is done. But the area has provided him with plenty of memories, from the milestone 200th win to the pastries he's enjoyed at Donut Dip, his all-time favorite donut place.

There's also that home opener. McKenna got the start on Oct. 22 in front of a sellout crowd of 6,793, making 21 saves as the Thunderbirds introduced themselves to their home fans with a 5-4 overtime win.

"That was honestly one of the best atmospheres I've ever played in in my life," McKenna said. "That night, that was an unforgettable game. ... I hope people know how thrilled we are that we've had such good fan support, truly, because I know it's because our front office has worked their tail off to do it, because I've seen both sides of this.

"They've worked incredibly hard. But ultimately you can only do so much, and we've had a great response. It really means a lot to go out and play in front of people. That's ultimately what we enjoy."

And there's still more hockey to be played; the all-time American wins leader in the AHL can still add to that total.

"Just watching these things like 200 wins in the AHL, playing 500 pro games, it's been absolutely wild to see him do it," Rachel said. "I always knew he could, I always believed he could, but it's been awesome to see him just kind of make his mark."

Mike never set his sights on a particular milestone, or aimed to play for a certain number of years. As long as he has a team, he intends to keep enjoying the experience.

"I've always just played to see how far it would take me, and I keep having fun doing it," he said.