Jordan Landry played hockey in a league for one season before his health took him off the ice.

Then, he played mini-sticks in the hallways of Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital with resident clown A. Leboo.

He played air hockey in the lounge.

He made team logos out of melted beads — his goal was to do all 30 NHL teams but he did his favourite first: the Chicago Blackhawks, an inexplicable choice to his family, who all cheer for different teams.

He invited nurses to come to his room at, say, 2 p.m. for a game. They did and he played all the positions himself.

Jordan was born with a heart abnormality, hypoplastic left heart syndrome, that rendered the left side of his heart underdeveloped. At 9 years old, he’d already gone through three heart surgeries.

He was put on a transplant list in June 2013. The Landry family moved from Dowling, Ont., northwest of Sudbury, to Ronald McDonald House in Toronto.

They got a call on Sept. 16, 2013. Were they interested in watching the Toronto Maple Leafs take on the Philadelphia Flyers that night, from the high-flying vantage point of Leafs captain Dion Phaneuf’s box?

“He was very excited. Very, very excited,” says Jordan’s mother, Nancy Landry.

Jordan took in the game with his mom, dad Matthew, little sister Reegan, and another family from Sick Kids. It was the second time the Landry family watched a game from Phaneuf’s box — they’d been there in April, too.

But part way through the game, Phaneuf himself walked in.

Reegan was terrified. She hid behind her parents before peeping out, “Go, Blackhawks, go.”

“I was like, ‘No, honey, it’s the wrong team,’ ” says Nancy, laughing.

Jordan, though, beamed.

Phaneuf hasn’t won over the wholehearted adoration of Leafs Nation to the extent of some of his predecessors, like Doug Gilmour and Wendel Clark. He’s not a super-superstar, nor is he as widely known, in Toronto at least, for philanthropic pursuits as some colleagues who’ve worn the capital C. But Phaneuf donates tickets for each of the roughly 40 home games a season to Sick Kids. He’s been doing it since he arrived in Toronto.

That night so touched the Landry family that Nancy wrote the Star in hopes of expressing her gratitude in such a way that he might actually hear it. A thank-you card could so easily get lost in a stack, she figured. Maybe this way someone will say, ‘Hey, look.’ And he’ll know how grateful they are.

“It made a really nice night for Jordan and for all of us, really,” says Nancy. “That’s what we remember: thank goodness he had that really good night before. . .”

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She doesn’t finish the sentence.

It was Jordan’s last night of being Jordan, that fun-loving, vibrant, sparkling boy who made friends wherever he went, with everybody (he was pals with housekeeping staff at Sick Kids; Nancy once came across him atop a ladder with a maintenance staffer helping change a light bulb).

Phaneuf signed photos for the kids, posed for pictures. Then, he sat down next to Jordan and for the next 20 minutes, they talked. About Gatorade — Jordan’s favourite drink, off-limits because of the low-sodium diet he had to maintain — and about Phaneuf’s new puppy. They talked hockey.

“He was very nice,” says Nancy.

The call came the next morning. There was a heart for Jordan.

At the hospital, the preparation went on for hours. The whole time, Jordan talked about his night. He told A. Leboo, the clown, “Oh, I talked to Dion Phaneuf last night. He sat beside me.”

Before Jordan went into surgery at 3:30 p.m., Nancy asked him if there was anything he wanted when he came out.

“If he asked for the moon, I would honestly have tried to get it,” says Nancy. But he asked for Gatorade. The yellow kind.

The surgery lasted for 15 hours. There were problems, complications. Jordan didn’t wake up again.

He passed away on Sept. 20.

Everyone in Jordan’s family cheers for the Blackhawks now.

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