Boston Bruins Announce Additions to Player Engagement Staff
When the Boston Bruins hosted the Carolina Hurricanes on May 12, 2019, for Game 2 of the National Hockey League’s Eastern Conference final, The Providence Journal deployed Assistant Sports Editor Mark Divver to write a notebook and Kevin McNamara to write a column, while I wrote the game account for the Gatehouse New England newspapers’ coverage.
The Bruins beat the Canes, 6-2, on their way to a convincing, four-game sweep before the NHL made them wait 11 days to play the Stanley Cup Final against the St. Louis Blues.
The reason the Projo threw the kitchen sink at this hockey game was more than the gravity of the series and more than an otherwise-slow Sunday afternoon (sportswriters crave an off day, trust me). The occasion, it so happened, was the only Boston Bruins game or practice that Patriot Ledger reporter Mike Loftus would miss in 31 years on the beat. His son Ben graduated that day from Emerson College.
There was no room for less than our best that day because we were pinch-hitting for the best.
Never has there been a more uncompromisingly professional, hard-working reporter than Mike Loftus, and having inherited his mother’s passion for hockey and the Boston Bruins, the team was the beneficiary of his unrelenting standards for three, once-interrupted decades.
It was with a thud that Sunday’s news set in that Mike Loftus has passed away after battling cancer when he had barely reached retirement age.
Of course, it was too soon for his family but even for his friends and colleagues to lose Mike, with whom former NHL.com reporter Matt Kalman and I were privileged to share Level 9 workstations overlooking the Zamboni gate in the northwest corner of TD Garden ice.
