This was all happening so blasted fast for Don Granato. This whole life and death thing sneaking up on him in a way he couldn’t have possibly imagined.



One day late in training camp he felt a bit run down. Next thing he knew a team of doctors had stormed into his room at Buffalo General Hospital and told him they’re putting him under. Now.



The hockey lifer and current assistant coach with the Buffalo Sabres was actually holding his phone in his hand trying to explain to his brother Tony, the head coach at the University of Wisconsin, what was happening.



But the doctors were having none of it.



“I told him, Tone, they’re putting me out and I don’t know what can really happen,” Granato recalled in his first interview since his dramatic brush with death. “They got the mask on me, the anesthesiologist, as I’m on the phone. And the doctor’s like, ‘you have got to listen to me right now, right now,...