Give blood, play hockey--and live to tell about it.

This is a story so small that no one reported it.

It didn't happen in professional sports or big-time college sports. No one saw it on television, and there were only about 600 people in the building. It's a story about people you've never heard of before and likely will never hear of again.

It begins with blood on the ice.

Usually, in hockey, blood on the ice is evidence of someone's fist applied to someone's nose. Or someone has used a stick to rearrange someone's hairdo. What we forget is that everyone wears razor blades on their feet.

Even when Ryan Theros went down in a tangle of three bodies with 2 minutes left and his team losing, 5-1, the collision looked no different than hundreds of others since he first stood tall on hockey's steel blades as a 3-year-old.

This time, though, he felt pain high in his left thigh, near the groin. He saw his pants cut open, his padded breezers sliced. There was such a gash in his leg that he could see "pure white fat hanging out." Later, he figured the back point of someone's skate blade had gouged him open.

The big man--a 6-1,235-pound senior forward from Two Harbors, Minn.--rose from the pile and skated toward the Northland College bench for a line change. But at the boards, as Theros started to leap over, he couldn't do it. Instead, he collapsed. That's when he saw the blood. "It was pumping out," is the way he put it.