At least, it appears they succeeded. The friend with cancer, Blake Cognata, is a senior lacrosse player from Fairport, NY who is also Minnesota Vikings fan. From what we can gather, Cognata seems to be a pretty good dude. Unsurprisingly, then, a groundswell of support developed around the senior to get the hashtag #APCallBlake trending on Twitter—or at the very least spam the hell out of Peterson's mentions—so that he would call Cognata. According to his friends, it worked. The picture you see above is supposedly the moment Peterson called and it makes sense—who videos a random phone conversation, right?


Zack Mentz, the sports editor at John Carroll University, went to the same high school as Cognata and he and another friend from Fairport—Dylan George—got the ball rolling on what would eventually be a pretty great story.

Now, Peterson has not mentioned anything on Twitter about the call—he's been silent since Saturday—so it is at least possible that this feel-good story is some kind of terrible internet hoax, but that would be a pretty awful thing to have done to all these people who jumped on board to support a legitimately sick kid. We're going to go with feel-good for now. Here's a selection from #APCallBlake on Twitter.