Before every home game, Red Wings captain Henrik Zetterberg looks up during the warm-up skate to where she would sometimes sit. There isn’t much time to think about anything other than hockey in those moments leading up to the opening faceoff, but he makes sure he takes a moment. And somewhere in that moment within a moment, he thinks of her.

“It’s so hard to say how and why we connected,” Zetterberg said. “That’s how life is; you connect better with some people.”

From the very beginning, he connected with Mollie.

There really wasn’t any story behind that name. It just seemed to fit her. Mollie was a sunny name for a bright girl. She seemed to be smiling right out of the womb.

“I wanted a name that made her different,” said her mom, Colleen Moquin, “and she was different.”

Mollie played all kinds of sports growing up in Flushing, Mich., from swimming to basketball, volleyball to soccer. She never played hockey, but it became a favorite when she began watching it on TV. Soon her whole family was watching it with her. She had that kind of charisma; people just followed along.

“Always happy,” Colleen said. “Very, very happy.”

Mollie was 8 years old when she started mentioning some pain in her leg. She didn’t complain much — she never did — but her parents took her to the doctor. They figured it was just growing pains. The pain got worse, and the doctors said the same thing: Tylenol, Motrin.

Then, after still another visit, Colleen got a call from the doctors. They had changed their interpretation of an X-ray. Mollie needed to come in for more testing.

This time, doctors did a biopsy. They found a tumor in the right side of her pelvis. Colleen’s sense that it wasn’t just growing pains was right. It was Ewing’s Sarcoma.

Mollie had stage 4 bone cancer.

View photos Mollie Moquin fell in love with the Red Wings and Henrik Zetterberg in particular. More

“We just held onto that 10 to 15 percent chance that she would survive,” Colleen said. She and Mollie’s dad, Craig, told their daughter there was a tumor, and that chemotherapy would shrink it. Mollie took the news without a trace of fear.

“She never questioned it,” Colleen said. “Never said, ‘Why me?’ Still through all of this, still happy.”

Mollie would lose the chance to play the sports she loved. What she found, though, was a love of the Red Wings. In December 2009, she got to go to a game as part of Mike Babcock’s ongoing relationship with Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. Mollie got to meet the coach and he invited her back later in the season to see the locker room and meet the players. Even then it was clear who she wanted to meet most.

That April, Mollie returned. Colleen spotted Zetterberg and walked right up to him, telling the Red Wings captain that Mollie referred to him as “her man.” Zetterberg laughed. Mollie most certainly did not.

“Mom!” she said, “Stop embarrassing me!”

A few minutes later, Zetterberg left the locker room and returned. He was holding a stick that he handed to Mollie. He had written a note on it and signed it, “Your man, Henrik Zetterberg.”

Mollie turned bright red.

“She was so giggly,” Zetterberg said. “Always smiling, always laughing in a giggly way. She had so much energy inside of her. Once it came out, she couldn’t stop talking.”

After that meeting, the Red Wings didn’t see Mollie for a while. Her cancer went into remission.

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