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Lisbona, the younger, had a higher purpose in mind before setting his mother loose. The 48-year-old has long been involved in a charity that ships hockey bags full of hockey gear to Metula, an Israeli town on the Lebanon border that is home to the country’s only Olympic-sized skating rink — plus the Canada Israel Hockey School. The school brings together Jews, Christians, Druze and Muslim Arab kids in the hope that, through hockey, they build cross-cultural understanding in a region with long simmering tensions. It is also a program that, in November, had informed its Canadian benefactors that what the players needed most wasn’t more skates, or gloves, or pants or helmets or goalie pads — but cups (aka jockstraps).

“It was so obvious to me after they told us,” David Lisbona says. “We hadn’t been sending them cups, and they don’t have a culture of tackle football — and they don’t really use them for soccer — so they simply aren’t available in Israel.”

Levav Weinberg, the program’s founder, and a farmer in the Metula area, puts it this way: “Without donations the program would still be running, but it would look like the hockey in Canada in the 1930s, when the players had no helmets.”

Lisbona and his mother purchased about 30 discounted jocks in the Montreal area, which was a good start, but far short of the 300-plus he required to outfit all the Israeli players. So Lisbona turned to Facebook, appealing to his friends across the country to go forth and buy cups. Progress reports rolled back to him in Montreal: Winnipeg had no discounted jocks; Edmonton had 15, procured there by a Montreal-based accountant on a business trip; Squamish, B.C. yielded 29 cups; while Toronto and the communities stretching east of the city — Oshawa, Bowmanville, Coburg — had jocks aplenty. Greens and blues and reds and whites and off-white cups, in many shapes and sizes.