from Kevin Paul Dupont of the Boston Globe,

Pursuing the hockey dream, and its endless stream of promises and $5 trophies, is a pricey proposition. Parents of young puck chasers can go broke shelling out for sticks, skates, travel teams, and power-skating lessons, tossed headlong into the financial abyss with the hope that junior at least comes out of it with a free ride to a Division 1 college program.

For the vast percentage of kids, the D1 scholarship never materializes, after an investment of maybe a dozen years and easily $50,000 — possibly more, when adding up all the gas money, Motel 6’s, the beer, the pizza, and that crappy caffeine concoction that pours steaming hot out of arena vending machines, tapped directly from a Jiffy Lube recycling tank.

Rick Middleton, one of the most talented players ever to pull on a Bruins sweater, is convinced street hockey helped make his dream a reality. Not only street hockey, of course, because it is never just one thing. Talent and will and commitment have many origins.

For Middleton, though, a key ingredient was growing up at 80 Gilroy Drive in Scarborough, Ontario, just a few miles northeast of downtown Toronto. The Maple Leafs were the hottest team in Canada, with four Stanley Cup title in the 1960s. Middleton was an impressionable 13-year-old, six years before his draft year of 1973, when his hometown heroes clinched the last (and still most recent) of those four titles.

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