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Temporary pilgrims arrived last week with flowers, cards and curious fingers.

They’re still trickling in, touching Gordie Howe’s upraised elbow and feeling the imagined heft of his bronze, unmoving stick.

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It’s nice, this attention. Beautiful, even, because so much of Bronze Gordie’s life has been a lonely sort of thing.

Photo by Liam Richards / THE CANADIAN PRESS

He was birthed at studios in Eston and near Saskatoon, then abandoned by the group that first commissioned him, because they ran out of funds. The sculptor loved him, though, and because of that love, he finished the job using his own money — laboriously casting straight-bladed stick, old-fashioned gloves, sharp elbow.

Bronze Gordie stood on a prairie field for a while, lonely in limbo.

The real Gordie Howe visited the statue, out on that field, and told sculptor Michael Martin that while great, its “head is too fat” — it looked more like his brother, Vic.

So off came Bronze Gordie’s head, and on came a closer likeness, and he stood on that field a while longer while the City of Saskatoon rejected his very presence — “no artistic value,” said the city’s visual arts placement jury; “no enduring quality.”