"I'm saddened by his passing, but to me, this is a life to be celebrated, a life that was so influential to many of us." Coach Mike Keenan

Okay, so maybe he was a bit goofy.

He could break down and stop the best offence in hockey, but sometimes couldn't find his way out of the parking lot at the shopping centre. He never said anything worse than "Aw rats! " in a world where profanity is considered the mother tongue.

He challenged, and often successfully broke, every rule in the book, yet lived 69 years and five days by the 10 rules in the only book he considered sacred.

He reached the top of a profession millions of Canadians only dream of attaining, was hired by 10 organizations and fired by nine of them, had property he sometimes lost track of and money in the bank he had no idea what to do with -- yet always regretted giving up the Peterborough paper route he built up to 2,000 customers before moving on to the professional hockey world that became his life. He acted like sentimentality was a waste of time, yet spent weeks each fall painstakingly writing out personal greetings on Christmas cards until they numbered into the thousands.

He was as loyal to dogs as dogs are to humans -- taking them to work with him, burying them at his cottage and once, when one old mutt lost control of its back legs, pushing it around in a shopping cart until it finally expired.

Roger Neilson passed on himself Saturday afternoon.

The lifelong bachelor died leaving behind not a single living relative and yet, after 50 years of coaching and a very public battle with cancer, it can be fairly said -- with whatever sentimentality the situation will bear -- that he had become family to everyone who has ever played or fallen for the national game.

His eccentricities -- the lack of socks, the outrageous ties, the ragged Abercrombie & Fitch baseball cap, the astonishing humility -- made him perhaps the best-loved figure in hockey long before he took on first one, then a second, virulent form of cancer.

The long-time coach was renowned in Vancouver for introducing the waving white towel during a 1982 playoff round.

He was admired in Toronto for defying the orders of nutbar Maple Leafs owner Harold Ballard to show up behind the bench wearing a brown paper bag over his head.

He was adored in Florida for turning the Panthers into a force before most hockey fans even realized they were in the league.

And he was respected in Philadelphia for the dignity he showed when stripped of his job by general manager Bob Clarke, who had the ill grace to say Neilson had gone "goofy" on the team and "We didn't ask Roger to get cancer."

Neilson simply laughed off Clarke's cruel comments and went on with his treatments and his life, heading off to the Ottawa Senators where they made him an assistant coach -- and, for two quick games, head coach so he could say he had coached 1,000 games in the National Hockey League -- and where his reputation for eccentricity, mischief and unbelievable kindness merely grew by the day.

"You certainly wouldn't call him normal," his 30-year best friend, Nancy Nicholds of Dallas, once said. "He's consistently abnormal, but maybe that makes him more normal than the rest of us.

"He never pretends to be someone else. He is what he is, whether it's talking to an 11-year-old at a hockey camp, to an $8-million-a-year superstar or to the president of Israel. He's still Roger, barefoot and in his baseball cap."

He was never a speechmaker, and yet he spoke eloquently this past year over what being named to the Order of Canada and the Hockey Hall of Fame meant to him.

And there is likely not an Ottawa player today who will not tear up thinking about Game 5 of the Senators' eastern final playoff against the New Jersey Devils when they showed up in the dressing room to find Neilson, too frail to stand, already seated in a chair, waiting to talk to them about making the most of rare opportunities.

They won that night, and they won the next game, but the team fell short of what might have been his first Stanley Cup. The players felt worse about it than he did, for Roger Neilson refused to feel sorry for himself.

Bob Clarke should know that Roger Neilson didn't ask to get cancer, either. No one does. But millions do and only a very few -- Neilson is one, Edmonton antismoking crusader Barb Tarbox was another -- have to do battle in public, whether by circumstance or choice.

That they do so with such courage is because the long treatment has taught them so many others are up against the same thing, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, and largely unnoticed by all but those who can see nothing else.

Some people take such examples as lessons in how to die with grace, but, like Bob Clarke, they don't quite have it right.

The lessons are all about living in grace -- and making it count.

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