CBR Brave captain Mark Rummukainen and chairman Peter Chamberlain. Credit:Canberra Times DAY TWO: Thursday, February 27: A meeting of players and two local hockey officials sought to determine the viability of a new team to replace the Knights in the 2014 competition. With prospective players contacted, the verdict is that a competitive team can be assembled. The players have lots of great ideas, but not a lot of business acumen. Chamberlain seeks information from other AIHL clubs about the ''back-end'' costs of running a national team, everything from purchasing flights to merchandise vendors and rink leases. DAY THREE: Friday, February 28: With local media swarming all over the story, donations from fans from all over the world go past $10,000, generating a sense of mission. The league reveals the terms the new consortium will have to satisfy by a meeting on Monday, 8pm: On-ice competitiveness; financial viability; guaranteed ice time for training and games. The Mustangs offer the prospectus they used to gain admission to the league four years ago. Mustangs players pass the hat around. DAY FOUR: Saturday, February 29: Interested parties convene at 8am. Chamberlain brings on board long-term client Jamie Wilson, head of advertising agency Coordinate, which has worked with most Canberra sporting organisations on their branding, logos and publicity. His agency created the CBR branding of the city itself, which becomes integral to the new entity. He begins processing all the information into a ''schmick'' presentation for the AIHL. DAY FIVE: Largely a repeat of day four. Uniforms, a name, a logo, a rink deal with ex-manager Raut. Chamberlain's mini-committees report back and discuss.

DAY SIX: The hook-up with the AIHL comissioners is at 8pm. Chamberlain begins speaking at 8.01. At 8.02, the final pages of Wilson's submission reach his hands. The presentation, planned to run for an hour, runs for two-and-three-quarter hours. It is impressive and thorough enough that the league says, ''You’ve answered every question and more''. Its recommendation will be to admit the new team to the AIHL. Online donations now total more than $27,000, after an injection from hockey enthusiasts as far afield as Norway and Canada. DAY SEVEN: AIHL clubs vote to admit the CBR Braveas the replacement for the Canberra Knights, the name of which ex-manager Raut wants to retain. On day 16, Chamberlain is still swamped, and he admits that after the initial rush of ideas and adrenaline ''was not the hard part''. The work has just begun, with uniforms to be ordered, imports to be finalised and arranged, a website to be built, memberships sold, a more sustainable club structure to be implemented. An entire club has to be built from scratch, though it already has a supporter base and players. But Chamberlain and Wilson and Rummukainen are so busy that tasks prioritise themselves. There can be no fine-tuning of junior development, governance and the nuances of the limited guarantee company that has been created before the team is put together and the season started. Chamberlain is committed to running the commercial entity in the short-to-medium term. He aims to have a fully-paid general manager to take over many of the day-to-day activities of the club, an expectation not met elsewhere in the league. In some ways, such a goal speaks to why the Brave is likely to work – new blood, fresh ideas. Chamberlain and Wilson are successful entrepreneurs in their early to mid-30s. ''You can’t run things the way they were run 30 years ago,'' Chamberlain says.

Chamberlain and Wilson have reacted to the demise of a club they had no involvement with, and delivered the details of a viable alternative, in less than a week, using conservative projections which factor in unforeseen costs. There is energy, enthusiasm and a can-do attitude. There is also expert financial acumen, marketing knowledge, negotiating prowess. And this latent expertise was there all along and went untapped. The demise of the Knights could prove to be the luckiest bounce of the puck ice hockey in the ACT has experienced. Chamberlain admits the final designs for the new team were not finished before the league gave the team the go-ahead. But the ''Brave'' name was set in stone. The reasons why it was chosen expose a mindset which should give the sport a massive kick-start in Canberra. ''We loved the idea of the Melbourne Heart, the modern name, the modern logo, rather than pitching an animal or one of these other things that has been done for year-on, year-on end. Jeez, you’ve got this group of five or six senior players who’ve gone 'we are not going to lie down, we want our team, we want our hockey'. ''And they were really brave about putting their hand up and going to the league and saying 'we’d like to apply for this licence'. And you look at all the community and all the people who chipped in $50, $100, $1000, $5000 to the pledge page, not knowing if they’d actually get a team at the end of it. It’s a pretty brave thing to do.

''Then the sponsors who have come on board. And also the board members and the volunteers who have put all this time into to it. It’s very brave thing to do. So we thought [Brave] just encapsulated the spirit of the team, the spirit of the organisation.''