I couldn’t have been the only one who sensed that something awful was going to happen eventually, that the speed and brute force Lindros brought to the game would eventually exact a tragic human toll, maybe even a mortal one. I’m sure that I was just one of thousands in the arena in Ottawa who thought, on Halloween night in ’98, that we had actually seen that price paid in real time.

On that night, the Flyers were in to play the Senators, an early-season game of no great consequence, certainly not a heated rivalry. Late in the first period the puck was dumped in to the home team’s end of the ice and with defencemen changing, it was left to resolute journeyman winger Andreas Dackell to skate back and retrieve it. Lindros bore down on Dackell in full flight with none of the Senators there to hold him off or slow him down. His hit on Dackell was so sudden and shocking it was hard to figure out what happened until the replay, and even then there were questions. Did Lindros get his elbow up or did Dackell duck? Did Lindros jump into him or did his skates just lift off the ice on impact? The referee, Richard Trottier, didn’t call a penalty on the play but if he had blown his whistle, no one would have heard it over the boos.

The boos quieted to a hushed and worried murmur as Dackell laid on the ice in a slowly expanding pool of blood. It would take 12 minutes for him to be stretchered off. A replay from a camera in the corner of the rink, on the other side of the glass from the collision, showed the awful images of Dackell’s face being pressed into his shield, his helmet against the glass, a cut bursting open that would take 30 stitches to close. It wasn’t that Lindros was picking on a small player per se—at five-foot-11 and 190 lbs. Dackell was average size by the league’s standards, but he was still giving away five inches and more than 40 lbs.

Dackell was diagnosed with a concussion after the game but he still came out to speak with reporters. “At least I won’t have to buy a Halloween mask this year,” he said through swollen lips. “I felt like a beetle that hit the windshield.”

For his part, Lindros seemed genuinely remorseful: “I feel horrible after seeing someone lying on the ice like that. No one wants to see anyone hurt, Nobody has the intent to hurt anybody else. I just went in and finished my check.”

The hit on Dackell foreshadowed the future in a way that no one could have anticipated. There would be more collisions like it, but Lindros would be on the other awful end of them. It seemed so far-fetched, but it’s the nature of the game and probably all things: life is never so dangerous as when you’re presumed invulnerable.

Little noticed, Lindros had suffered a concussion a few weeks after Nagano: a hit by Darius Kasparaitis, the abrasive defenceman’s piece of revenge against the Russian-killing machine. A one-off, people imagined. Yeah, Lindros’s younger brother Brett had his career ended by a concussion after less than a dozen games with the Islanders. Still, that was Brett, not the most dangerous man in hockey. It didn’t seem like reason for others to think that they could start loading their slings.

The concussions came in quick succession the in the 1999-2000 season. The worst moments are too awful to watch and still terrifying just to catalogue. Just after Christmas, Calgary’s Jason Wiemer levelled a hit that gave Lindros a concussion. He missed two games. Mid-January, a couple of hits in a single shift in a game against Atlanta led to another concussion. He missed four games. Early March, Boston’s giant blueliner Hal Gill hit Lindros, who stayed in the game and played on for a week before his concussion was finally diagnosed by the team’s medical staff. He had to sit out the rest of the regular season. Early May, skating with the Flyers’ farm club on a conditioning stint, Lindros collided with a teammate in practice and suffered yet another concussion. And then in late May, he re-entered the lineup in the Conference Finals against the Devils and, in his second game back, was knocked unconscious, caught with a vicious check by Scott Stevens.

Stevens was nobody’s idea of David but that didn’t matter to many. They were just happy to see Goliath felled for his presumed hubris. In this case, Goliath was stretchered off the ice, the last time he wore a Flyers sweater. He wouldn’t return to an NHL arena for more than a year.