VANCOUVER—Robert MacKay barely thought about it, but when the moment came it seemed that trying to stop the rioters — and ending up with bruised ribs and bear spray in his face — was the right thing to do.

“It was more of a reaction than thinking. I just walked up there and saw people gutting the store and they needed help,” the 36-year-old chef said of his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to keep an angry mob from further smashing the windows of the flagship Bay store on Granville St. in downtown Vancouver after the Stanley Cup final game.

“I just felt it was the right thing to do. It was something I saw happening and I just wanted to stop it,” said MacKay, who was downtown to watch the game and knew things were going downhill when he saw black smoke billowing from a burning car. “I was pretty angry at that point.”

Grainy video footage posted online showed MacKay as he stepped in front of the window, alone, to challenge the rioters, who at first took a few steps back as he screamed that this was his city, before he stepped off the sidewalk and they began punching him from behind, dragging him down to the pavement.

The Toronto Star found MacKay through a friend and co-worker who knew he was the one in the video and after explaining that he had wanted to lay low for a while, he reluctantly told the story while getting ready for a busy night at Tramonto, a restaurant at the River Rock Casino Resort in nearby Richmond, B.C.

“Some guy prodded me or tried to lunge at me with a pole,” MacKay said as he explained how the moment progressed from yelling at the crowd to stepping defiantly into it. “I grabbed onto the pole and I just started pushing the crowd back and that is when I was surrounded and then taken down . . . After I was down on the ground, some guy came up and bear-sprayed my face.”

Two more guys came to his aid.

One in a yellow vintage Canucks jersey spread his arms to protect him and placed his hand on his shoulder, the other joining him despite having his shirt tugged by a young woman who wanted him to leave.

MacKay said he does not know who they are.

“I couldn’t even open my eyes at that point,” he said.

They helped him up and MacKay said they brought him to police at Howe and W. Georgia Sts.

“I was sitting on the curb,” MacKay said. “People walking by gave me their water bottles so I could rinse off my head. And then my girlfriend picked me up and then we walked home.”

She was worried. She told him to never do that again. She was also a little proud.

MacKay was happy to get into the shower. He was also glad to have the day off on Thursday, doing laundry and running errands with his girlfriend.

Shocked to see his face on the Star’s website and bemused by headlines calling him a Good Samaritan, he kept a low-profile as fellow citizens disgusted with what had happened went downtown to help sweep up broken glass and write hopeful and apologetic messages on the boarded-up windows.

MacKay said he saw federal Heritage Minister James Moore looking for him on the social media site Twitter, but wanted to let things calm down for a bit before reaching out to him.

Earlier Friday, Moore said he wanted to congratulated MacKay and the others who tried to intervene because he believed the riot could have stopped if more people showed the same courage.

“The character that he showed and the courage that he showed to try to stand up for what was right . . . was more than exemplary. I think if more Vancouverites who were on the scene at the moment had showed a little more civic courage like those particular individuals, I think a lot of the damage might not have happened,” Moore said at the Vancouver Convention Centre, where he is observing the biennial NDP policy convention.

“It might be easy to Monday morning quarterback these kind of things, but that said he was there, some (other) people were there, and they did some pretty impressive things and I think they deserve to be recognized.”

MacKay said that deep down he feels good about what he did, although he is unsure he would do it all over again.

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“It’s not in my nature. It just happened,” said MacKay. “You have to be in the moment to see if that could happen or not.”

Originally from Kingston, Ont., MacKay said the riot did not change his feelings about Vancouver, his home for the past eight years.

“It’s still the city that I love,” MacKay said. “It’s great, it’s beautiful. I don’t think any worse of the city. . . . It was a few hundred people and then the bandwagon riders came on. That can happen anywhere, as we’ve seen in Montreal and other Canadian cities.”

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