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Flood of late donations buoys Guinness Record hockey marathon:
Buzzer finally ends play after non-stop 246-hour match in Chestermere Arena

Bryce Forbes, Calgary Herald, May 16, 2012

CHESTERMERE, AB — They played 246 straight hours of hockey — but it took the final buzzer to finally slow them down.

Two hours earlier, they had already set a Guinness World Record for the longest hockey game.

Yet as the last seconds finally ticked away at the Oilympics Hockey Marathon, they still wanted to give a show to the cheering fans at the jam-packed Chestermere Arena.

“These guys are nuts, these guys are absolutely nuts,” said team captain and organizer Alex Halat.

“These guys did not stop for 10-and-a-half days. There was no off switch in them, whether it was one in the morning or one in the afternoon.

“They were going 100 miles an hour and they were going for the win.”

Unfortunately for Halat, his Team Hope was on the wrong end of a 4,178-3,845 score, as the teams combined for a record 8,023 goals.

The final score didn’t matter, though.

It was all about the $1.4 million and counting that will go to the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation.

Hopes were bleak around the arena heading into the final 48 hours. They had only raised $822,000 going into play on Tuesday morning.

But donations soon flooded in from all over the world — around $200,000 on Tuesday and at least $400,000 on the last day.

Halat was confident they had broken the $1.5-million goal, with donations still being accepted online for those interested in topping up the total.

“I’m so happy for all the kids here that we did something awesome — we really did,” said a beaming Lyall Marshall, holding six-year-old daughter Diamond Marshall. “It means a lot for everyone that got those needed funds in.”

Those funds will be going toward cancer research and equipment in the hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit.

“It’s absolutely critical to the hospital,” said Kathy Greenwood, ACHF’s vice-president of development.

“The difference that it makes to the kids and the families at the hospital to have state-of-the-art equipment especially in our pediatric intensive care unit means that the treatment is quicker, it’s faster, it’s better, it’s less invasive.”

At the closing ceremonies, Dave Shillington was given a golden stick for his record 524 goals and Halat was awarded a mini-Stanley Cup for all the work he did.

Country music superstar Paul Brandt serenaded the crowd with I Was There, the song he wrote for the 2012 World Junior Hockey Championship in Calgary.

For the players who were adored like rock stars to the fans for more than 10 days — signing autographs and posing for photos — they’ll now head back to the real world of families, jobs and honey-do lists.

They have plenty of injuries to heal, from blisters and skate bite all the way up to separated shoulders, broken ankles and concussions.

“I miss my family and I want to go home, but I don’t think we will ever forget what we are doing today,” said former Canadian Football League player Frank Pimiskern.

The players will need the rest.

Halat is already planning on doing it again — only bigger.

“It’s hard to believe we finished this,” Scott Logan said.

“It feels both like we just finished yesterday and at the same time it feels like we went for weeks and weeks.”

———-

Top goal scorers:

Dave Shillington — 524

Chris Robertson — 442

Casey Coutts — 397

Allen Bekolay — 379

Chris Wilkins — 323

(All five beat the previous record of 313 goals)

Dean
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