This is a few years old, but we wanted to pass it on anyway. Here’s SI.com’s Michael Farber, from November 2010, on Brooks Laich:
Laich is one of the dressing-room talkers on the Capitals, an expansive 27-year-old who is the de facto conscience of the team. But on this night, he left the Verizon Center uncharacteristically without talking to the media that had assembled to ask the essential question: What the hell happened? The Capitals, the NHL’s best team during the regular season, had just coughed up a first-round playoff series to the Montreal Canadiens, blowing a 3-1 lead by losing Game 7.
He was headed home, crossing the Roosevelt Bridge over the Potomac River, when he saw a woman and her daughter stranded next to a late-model Acura. The car had a flat tire. Laich could have kept his foot on the accelerator of his SUV — he had been having his own rotten night, you know? — but he slowed and pulled over in front of the car to see if he could help. The woman, Mary Ann Wangemann, who happened to have been at the game with her 14-year-old daughter Lorraine — they were both decked out in Capitals apparel when Laich stopped — said she had already called for auto service but a high volume of calls was backing things up.
So Laich, whom they immediately recognized, went to work.
Reportedly the tire change took 40 minutes. At one point the Acura fell off the jack and Laich, dressed in a going-to-work suit, had to start anew. Finally he finished. And it was then that Mary Ann asked for a hug. Laich had one for her, another for her daughter.
Read the full story here.
—AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Paul Chiasson
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