Life Lessons, with Shane Doan (and a 16-year-old broken stick)

As if we needed another reason to absolutely love Shane Doan, right?

This story relayed via AZCentral Sports, is something you should take a few minutes to read. Anyone, really, but especially if you're a parent. 

The gist of it revolves around the remnants of one of many hockey sticks a young Doan smashed sometime during the 1997-98 season right after he learned that he was reassigned to the AHL. He lost his cool.

“It wasn’t exactly my finest hour,” Doan recalled, laughing.

“I don’t mind emotion. I love emotion. I think it’s great. But there was an element where you don’t want to let it control you and for a minute there, it had control of me.”

He's going to turn this into a lesson for his children.

“I’m going to talk to my daughters, too. I’m going to talk to all four of my kids about this,” Doan promised. “The message will be, ‘Look, you’re going to fail and there are going to be times when things aren’t going to work out the way you thought they would,’ because everybody has a plan about what they think their life’s going to be and how it’s going to go.”

“When things are going your way and all of a sudden it takes a big left turn, that’s sometimes the hardest point to really believe that you’re going to be capable of getting back on the plan that you thought. And maybe the plan is different than what you thought, and it works out even better.”

Source: Bob McManaman, AZCentral Sports