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The bucket list item of attending a Stanley Cup final hasn’t been crossed off yet, but I experienced a unique proxy Monday night.

Circumstances resulted in my being in Chicago for business the same night the Hawks ended up polishing off the B’s. I saw only the last ten minutes of the game, but as you know, that WAS the game. So, with their second Cup in four years, the Chicago dailies celebrated the win with the cheeky headline – REFILL!!!

The Windy City is back to being the Winning City. This is a community that loves their champions. Across the street from my hotel sat Ditka’s restaurant, named for the Bears’ last Super Bowl winning coach. The wireless password for visitors at the company I was meeting with was “JORDAN23” and if I have to explain that, please STOP READING MY BLOG! Immediately. An office tower on Lakeshore Drive was lit up with GO HAWKS GO, spelt out by a precise pattern of offices left lit for the evening. The night after the big win, it was joined by several downtown landmarks awash in celebratory red.

All day Tuesday the entire city sported a goofy grin. A championship mood carried in by the lake breeze made the buzz of activity seem effortless. A parade to be planned. Sponsor tribute ads crafted for publication. Championship souvenirs put on display.

By fluke I got within a few feet of the entire team and the Cup on Tuesday night as they partied at Rockit Bar&Grill on Hubbard. Dozens of cops closed the street as the players hoisted the trophy to the squealing delight of thousand of young fans below. They lapped up every glimpse of the hardware and the sprayed champagne sent raining from a second floor patio by the jubilant players. Each of them holding up a smart phone to create their not so unique memory of this glimpse with glory.

Silly as it may seem on paper, it was an indescribable atmosphere, one that I can only hope we feel soon.

This week I am chairing a panel at the AFP Fundraising Day, entitled The Evolution of Corporate-Charity Partnership.

My panelists, representing HydroOne, ReMax, ING Direct, and PwC, have volunteered their time to share some insider tips for the attending charities including how to structure your approach, create, and fulfill a corporate partner.

One theme that charities and property rights holder can’t avoid is the influx of companies creating an umbrella strategy or often their own property, and then pursuing delivery partners. I think this trend illuminates several lessons for support seekers.

The newest kid on the block, no pun intended, is the Rogers Youth Fund. The Rogers Youth Fund is built on an educational platform aimed at Canadian teens. With a diverse network of partners they are deploying some unique programs.

This past week they Launched their newest effort, Connected for Success. It’s brilliant.

Connected for Success offers teens living in Toronto Community Housing residences an opportunity to secure Internet broadband service and a fully loaded computer at very low prices.

Dramatically Rogers has levelled the playing field, ensuring that virtually any TCH resident can now afford high speed access for just $ 9.99 a month and a flat $ 150 for the computer. By eliminating the financial accessibility barrier, Rogers will immediately help young students in critical Toronto neighbourhoods; propel these youth to university; and ultimately help create a more robust, safe, and energized community.

This partnership between Rogers Youth Fund and Toronto Community Housing feels more like a revolution than an evolution. Perhaps I should rename my talk.

Traditionally, the week after the Canadian Sponsorship Forum, my blog attempts to summarize the conference’s highlights.

Tributes to speakers. Kudos to our partner event. Platitudes for the host city. This trio of topics meriting a dedicated paragraph, each tasked with the implausible goal of simulating the emotion of the live event. Since the majority of readers didn’t attend the event, it would seem my recap would be falling on deaf ears.

Eagerly I wanted to try a new approach. I do apologize if you wanted a highlight reel, but the social space is filled with enough photos and posts to facilitate any emptiness I may leave you with.

So instead of sharing what was on our presentation screens, take a peek inside me. Because inside is where I benefited the most from this year’s event. Inside I felt a stronger connection to our speakers, delegates, and partners than I have ever had. It didn’t matter whether I was hanging with clients, employees, ex-employees, competitors, competitors to my clients, friends, strangers, or a mix of both. For some reason there was this incredible bonding among the group.

I think my personal lesson is how do I harness this feeling and leverage it? Often conference delegates, of any conference, are told they have 72 hours to implement what they have learned.

Seems to me conference organizers should follow the same rule.

I started delivering papers in Grade 6.

First the Toronto Star. Then the Orillia Packet & Times.

I had the perfect route. One road. No turns, no curves. Brant street. West to East. Never went East to West. Thirty homes. Twenty decent tippers. Four amazing tippers. One insane tipper. Five never tippers. Plus one dog, a real canine, who bit me. Twice.

Behind every mailbox, every screen door, every paper slot, and every front porch was a neighbour, a worker, a teacher, a preacher. Behind every door was a family, a widower, a factory worker, and an unemployed truck driver. Behind every door was someone who only bought the paper for the comics, the crossword, the Ann Landers letters, the sports pages, the employment ads.

Thirty little fortresses, yet all had much in common. They were Orillians. They lived on Brant Street. They were my customers.

I am pretty sure being their paper boy was where it started for me. You might call it people watching. Others may call it anthropology. I didn’t have a formal name for it. But it is a science.

It’s a study of what binds people. They weren’t just physical neighbours. They were neighbours. They watched each other’s kids. They watched each other’s backs. They cleared snow so their kids could walk to school. They cleared junk so they could rebuild. They found stray cats, stray dogs, and too often stray husbands.

They were a community.

I didn’t live on their street. But I was part of the street. I was the paper boy. But I didn’t know I mattered. Until one Christmas. Stupidly I lost a $5.00 tip from one family. Tearily I confessed my mistake to another customer.

As mad as I was, and my parents probably were, the neighbours were even more upset. They looked harder than I did for that fiver. Not because I lost it. Because they wanted to give it. They were proud someone in their community could give a $ 5.00 tip.

The meaning of this story may seem to have some loose connections, yet I tell it for one reason. A community is full of connections. There is nothing more powerful in the world.

A long time ago I helped build community by delivering the paper. Today I still build community for a living.

I was going to write a cheeky followup to my Leaf’s Prayer blog of last week.

Seemed to me that a mock obituary might have been fun. Would have been pretty easy to make a few cracks about “choking” and the resultant death of our Leaf Nation playoff hopes.

But then reality set in when the body of Tim Bosma was found. Brutally abducted, murdered, and incinerated. A young husband and father stolen from our midst.

I was going to write about how sad it is we won’t see more people jumping on the Blue & White bandwagon, upon which I was Exhibit A, despite being a season ticket holder.

But then the bandwagon of Canadian retailers and clothiers condemning the working conditions of Bangladesh raced on past me, in a hurry. Over a thousand people killed because some factory owner valued money over his fellow countrymen.

It’s a bit comical and a lot sickening to see how the companies that had their clothes made there are suddenly racing to be the good guy and enforce new standards. Why didn’t you adopt such rigor before the tragedy?

Even worse, I am sure each of us have personally bought clothes from these “Canadian” companies which were made in that factory. We participated in the slaughter.

I was going to write about how sport feels like life and death during a seventh game overtime period.

But then Ottawa teenager, Rowan Stringer, who proclaimed on her Facebook page that “rugby is life”, was killed playing that very sport.

These three tragedies give all of us reason to pray. While sport can be a nice diversion from everyday life, it is no cure for tragedy. Regardless of what or who you believe in, say your version of prayer that such tragedy does not befall your spouse, your daughter, or your sister eking out a living in a garment factory.

Our King Clancy in heaven,
Hallowed be they name.
Your Leaf Nation come,
your will be done,
on ice, as it is in heaven.
Give us this weekend our needed victories,
and forgive our turnovers,
as we seem to forgive others,
and lead us not into golf season,
but deliver us from elimination.

We both know he’s not the only one. But for now he’s the only one brave enough to come out of the locker room and admit he’s gay.

Statistically speaking there is no possible way that Jason Collins is the only homosexual athlete to earn a living in the NBA, NFL, CFL, MLS, MLB, or NHL. Yet from the protective confines of a room full of teammates, only Collins has braved to step onto the lonely stage of disclosure, as a one-man show.

You can’t underestimate his bravery. He’s a 34 year old free agent journeyman with limited skills, seeking a new contract. Will his coming out prevent him from ever going back in? Back into the sacred hollow that is reserved for the best athletes in the world? Will he be welcomed with open arms and hearts, or will he be perceived as a freak who could be stealing a glance at an unexpected moment?

You can’t oversell the romance of a team dressing room. The locker room is the most amazing place in the world, although it’s not a real world.

In the locker room you are a physical god, regardless of whether you play house league, minor league, or beer league.

In the locker room you are surrounded by friends, even if you’re eight years old and don’t know the names of half the occupants, or you’re twenty-eight and on a 10-day contract.

In the locker room nonsensical motivational rants, “the only team that can beat us….is us”; sound almost as logical as the media sound bites, “we just have to play our game.”

But has the locker room also played bully in the situation of homosexual athletes? Does the machismo, the testosterone, the bravado expel those uncomfortable with their personal choices? On male teams, do the derogatory references that refer to less skilled players as “girls”, or the timid as “gays”, or the opponents as out and out “fags”, torture the soul of those who are trying to understand their sexual identity.

A colleague suggested this theory to me recently. That sports has less homosexuals than gen pop, because its pack mentality tends to scare people off.

He may be right. And that’s downright sad. Because every locker room needs a Jason Collins. Because Jason Collins is an athlete who has courage, an athlete who has fortitude, an athlete who isn’t afraid to come out of the locker room and answer the buzzer. The buzzer that is sounding a key message, “It’s about time.”