When Roberto Luongo was a kid he was shy, really shy. “The worst,” he says. He had four or five close friends, but clammed up around just about anybody else. If he had an oral presentation at school, he would fumble, freeze, fail. Luongo got better over the years, obviously. He had to.

On Feb. 14 a 19-year-old young man shot and killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where Luongo has lived for parts of nearly 20 years. The Florida Panthers goaltender passes the school every day on his drive to the rink. It’s on the right, just off the Sawgrass Expressway. There are still police cars there, every day.

When the shooting happened, he was on the ice for a morning skate in Vancouver; in Florida, his wife Gina had already heard there was a school shooting in Parkland, but for 10 or 15 stomach-hollowing minutes, she didn’t know which school it was. There were emergency school lockdown updates on Luongo’s phone when he returned to the locker room. When he called Gina, she didn’t answer. She called back in a panic. She was driving to their school.

Luongo is 38 now, nearly 39, a lion in a warm winter. Of the 21 goaltenders who have started at least 500 games in Luongo’s 18 seasons, he is tied for first with Henrik Lundqvist, Pekka Rinne and Carey Price with a .919 save percentage. He’s at .927 this year after fighting major injuries last season, and more this year. The Panthers have dragged themselves to the edge of the playoffs with wins in 20 of 27 games. He is thrilled.

But his season has been defined by his speech about the shootings before a game, eight days after they happened. The shooting wasn’t at his children’s school, but it stuck with nine-year-old Gabriella and seven-year-old Gianni. How do you explain something like this to kids?

“I don’t know,” Luongo says over the phone, the day before a game in Toronto. “That’s the thing. My daughter, she’s old enough that she understands everything. It’s not something that happened Feb. 14 and it’s over now. Every day, every morning before they go to school, they ask questions. What if he gets out of jail? What if somebody else ...

“And you don’t want to scare them, you try to comfort them, but it’s heartbreaking to see children at that age having questions about going to school. It doesn’t make sense, right? That a child has to have that in their minds on a daily basis.”

Parents, too. Luongo was there the first day the kids went back to school. He and Gina walked them to the gate, said goodbye, and then talked to a school employee, talked to a police officer, talked to anyone they could find. They spent maybe an hour there, maybe more, like they didn’t want to leave. When they finally went home, they sat and waited for school to end.

Before he gave the speech Luongo sat in the darkness on the Panthers bench as a tribute video to the victims played: 14 students, as young as 14 years old, and three adult staff. He had been asked by the team if he wanted to speak; he did.

“I had three or four things that I wanted to talk about, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget any of those things, because they were important to me,” Luongo says. “So I was on the bench looking at the video, and I started crying. It just got to me. My daughter’s 10 today, and a couple of the girls reminded me of her. One of the girls who died was a dancer, and my daughter dances. It just got to me. I was a mess. A few moments later I had the mic, and I was on the ice.”

He took a breath, settled himself, and spoke for three minutes. He said, “No child should ever have to go through that.” He said, “enough is enough. We’ve got to take action.” He called the teachers heroes; he called the kids from Parkland who have called for gun control, who have inspired marches across the United States and the world, “an inspiration to all of us.” He said, “you guys are what’s giving us hope for the future.”

“I said the school name backwards, which my daughter reminds me every month or so,” he says. “But it came out all right.”

His whole career prepared him for that moment. Growing up in hockey, Luongo kept his personality and sense of humour under cover until his hilarious, self-deprecating Twitter account, @strombone1, which started as a secret. He was naturally shy; going from the Islanders and Florida to the pressure cooker of Vancouver was an adjustment.

And there were hard times. Luongo faltered in Game 6 of the 2011 Stanley Cup final, with the Canucks a game away. They were shut out at home in Game 7, and the city rioted. The media criticism and organizational friction wore at him.

“Hockey made me grow up in a lot of ways, and the way I am today, versus how I was 20 years ago, even 10 years ago when I first started in Vancouver, it’s a lot different,” Luongo says. “Grew up a lot, I learned a lot. I had some tough times, as we all know, but I think those really helped me to grow as a person, mostly, more than anything.”

“The way I approach things, the way I see things, the way I react to things, it’s different, night and day. Back in the day every single negative thing would affect me, and I would take it to heart. And in Vancouver the way I reacted to certain things, to the media, it’s not something I’m proud of, but I learned from that and I learned to brush things off way easier.”

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“I still take things to heart, and I still have that drive and I’m really hard on myself, but I’m able to take what I need from it and move on, right? Whereas, back in the day it would stay with me for too long, and it would affect me, for the next game or whatever it was. It would stay with me, and that’s not how I want to do things.”

Luongo is so much more comfortable now. Two years after the Cup loss, as Cory Schneider supplanted him as the starter, he had to find a way to balance his bottomless competitive maw and his sanity. The Cup final, when he publicly jousted with Boston’s Tim Thomas before losing, still burns today.

“I don’t know if I’m really over it still,” Luongo says. “Not the result itself, because listen, somebody’s got to win, somebody’s got to lose, whatever. But just the way I reacted to certain things, and the way I let it bother me in a situation where I was in the Stanley Cup final and I was not enjoying it as much as I should have. I was living out a dream playing for the Cup, and I was not enjoying the moment because I was worried about outside stuff that was not important, and that’s the stuff that was hard to deal with for me. Obviously, losing is the worst. One game away from the Stanley Cup, which would have been unbelievable.”

“But looking back the thing that upset me the most was the way I reacted to things in the moment where I should have been having the time of my life. And that pisses me off.”

It was tough in Vancouver for a while. He has always been emotional, and never more than after Game 5. He lost that dream, he lost his starting job, his contract famously sucked. He wishes he had the peace, the balance, he has now. We all wish we knew then what we know now, sometimes.

“The whole Twitter thing, that’s how it started, right?” he says. “To laugh about things even though you’re in tough situations. You make light of it, you feel better, and you move on. And I think it really helped me with everything. I mean, especially the first little while, it was a lot of that. And now it’s become just the way it is.”

Things have gotten worse recently, even as life calms down. Gabriella is showing more signs of stress: stomach aches, headaches. Sometimes she doesn’t want to go to school. Even Gina still startles at sirens. They sent the kids to a child psychologist, just in case. They tell their kids they are safe, even though in their hearts they know they don’t know that. What else can you do?

“I wish I could give you the answers, that I had all the answers, but you don’t,” he says. “And that’s the most difficult part: when you try to be everything for your kids, and you feel like it’s not enough.”

Luongo watched the March For Our Lives on TV for five hours Saturday; if it hadn’t been a game day he would have marched in Parkland. He is astounded at how the Parkland High School kids have been smeared by some figures in American politics.

“I don’t understand why people are attacking them,” he says. “It doesn’t make sense to me at all. They just want to make it a better place, a safer place for everybody. Why is that bad?” He pauses. “I couldn’t even talk in front of five people at that age. It’s been amazing the courage that they have, the drive, the dedication. It’s unbelievable, unbelievable. It blows me away.”

Roberto Luongo is trying to be a lot of things: to be a good dad, a good goalie, a good man. He was a shy kid once, terrified to speak. But he got to grow up.