The laughter kept gnawing at him. These were hardened criminals who’d accepted their fates, he thought. At six-foot-four and more than 300 pounds, Stevens hadn’t feared much in his 50 years, and he wasn’t afraid of them. But the sinking inside felt something like fear — and shame and panic and loneliness. He’d felt it before in doses, but never quite like this. Stevens had fallen so far, and for so long, that he had forgotten there was a bottom. Now he looked at the concrete of his prison cell, hoping that he had found it. He thought about his teenaged children reading the headlines and seeing his picture in the paper, again. He thought about his newborn, already without a father. He thought about his sisters and his mom and the worry they must be feeling not knowing how to help him. He thought about his dad, who’d believed in Stevens to his last breath. And he thought about the pills and a quarter century of addiction.

How did it come to this? he asked himself.

As a young man, Stevens had embodied the American Dream: The athletic son of blue-collar family from Pembroke — just south of Boston — who was the captain of every high-school varsity team, took a full-ride to an an elite college, and then became an Olympian and an NHL star. Stevens hoisted two Stanley Cups with the Pittsburgh Penguins in the early ’90s, playing left wing beside Mario Lemieux. A big man who could pass and score, Stevens was heralded as one of the best power forwards in the game — and was rewarded with one of the NHL’s highest salaries.

But all of that ended after a horrific on-ice injury in which the bones of his forehead were crushed like potato chips, causing permanent damage to the frontal lobe of his brain. He was never the same player again, and the end of his NHL career was accompanied by a descent into addiction — both to party drugs, like cocaine, and opioids. For more than two decades, Stevens lived with a disease that took everything from him. But his arrest for dealing oxycodone in the spring of 2016 felt like bottoming out for good. Sitting in his cell, he prayed for one last chance to put the pieces of his life back together.