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The Canadiens’ Brendan Gallagher admits he was feeling sorry for himself two years ago after his left hand was shattered by a slapshot from the New York Islanders’ Johnny Boychuk during a game at the Bell Centre.

Then Gallagher went to visit kids at Montreal’s Shriners Hospital for Children with his mother, who was in town to help him during recovery from hand surgery.

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“I might have been feeling sorry for myself and thinking I’m not going to play hockey for a while,” Gallagher recalled in the Canadiens’ Brossard locker room Saturday morning. “And then you look at these kids and there’s a lot of things they’re not going to do for the rest of their lives because of the disability and something that they weren’t able to control. You go in there and it really puts things in perspective about how fortunate I am to be able to do what I love to do for a living. To be given an opportunity to help them out a little bit is a really good feeling.”