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BOSTON – They gathered late Wednesday night in a room beneath the TD Garden, each of the EMTs, firemen and state police officers holding their own horrible memory of the marathon gone wrong and the blood that stained the sidewalks. This was supposed to be a celebration and in a way it was: the Boston Marathon's first responders waiting to meet hockey players barely 55 hours after the first bomb went off. But what do you say when the common bond in the room were images of severed legs and gushing arteries?

"The number of children was incredible," said Jason Yutkins, an emergency medical technician with Boston EMS.

He was on Boylston Street when the bombs went off, racing to the site of the first explosion to see a sight none of them will likely ever witness again. So much blood. So many injuries. Even on Wednesday, after the first major sporting event in town – a 3-2 Bruins loss to the Buffalo Sabres – they were still numb, the visions of two days before raw. One by one the Bruins players walked in wearing suits. Patrice Bergeron. Andrew Ference, Tyler Seguin and others. They shook hands. They signed autographs. They smiled. And they shook away any words of appreciation. "No," they kept saying to the responders. "Thank, you."

And the responders laughed, almost euphoric in their first release since the explosions. The Bruins had invited 80 of them to Wednesday's game, gave them tickets and put a spotlight on them toward the end of the second period. The 17,565 in the stands stood and roared. The responders waved. No one in the stands could understand what they had seen.

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The fans on Wednesday could have known about Boston EMS Lt. John Cotter, who was knocked to the ground 10 feet from the first bomb and watched the side of the building down the street explode outward in the second bombing. A voice in his walkie-talkie said there was almost certainly a third bomb. Instinctively he yelled to his paramedics to stay in place. Don't move. Instead they grabbed stretchers and ran past.

"They didn't listen to me," Cotter said proudly. "They ran in to help people knowing there was probably a third bomb."

The fans could not have understood what it was like inside Marathon Sports, where the first bomb went off and a half dozen people lay on the floor injured. When the supply of stretchers was exhausted and too many injured remained, Yutkins and another EMT ripped off parts of a display wall, using the boards as makeshift stretchers that they then carried to the medical tent. When he ran out of tourniquets he pulled clothes off the rack. One woman handed him an expensive scarf. He wrapped it around the stump of a leg. No time for vanity. The injured were fading. Every minute mattered.

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