![]() He watched “Hockey Night in Canada” every Saturday with his parents. He once used a patch of ice frozen on the sidewalk to practice skating until his mom called him inside. Koehler’s relationship with hockey was a love affair from a young age. He reached the pinnacle, even if only for mere seconds. Of all the kids around the world who grow up playing hockey, only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction play in the NHL. “I have no regrets about what happened.”Īs his parents told him in the aftermath of his lone NHL game, he had made it. “I’m not here to cry the blues,” he says. Those are unanswerable questions, though not ones that eat at him. Or maybe he was simply good enough to reach the highest level - to inhale the cold air at ice level for one fleeting evening - but not good enough to stay there. Maybe, as he believes, the Hurricanes didn’t give him a fair shot. Now 48, Koehler isn’t blown away by the magnitude of making the NHL, nor is he tortured by staying there for less time than it takes to tie a shoe. Mistakes happen, especially when it comes to tracking who is on the ice at an exact moment. He recalls getting credited for a shift once in Buffalo despite sitting on the bench the entire game. Shane Willis, one of Koehler’s teammates in the Hurricanes organization, remembers something similar happening to him. Time on ice figures are kept manually, so it’s entirely possible the NHL employees logging 38 skaters’ time in the Carolina-Columbus game mistook someone else for Koehler. He took the ice only once, in the moments leading up to Heinze hooking Francis. But upon review of the game footage provided by the Blue Jackets, Koehler’s memory is correct. The official box score and NHL database mistakenly say Koehler played 46 seconds. He and Koehler are the only skaters in NHL history to have recorded only one shift. Jeff Libby, who played 43 seconds with the Islanders in 1998, is next closest. Since the NHL began tracking ice time in 1997-98, no skater’s career has been shorter than Koehler’s four seconds. Not that day, and never again in an NHL game.Īfter four seconds and eight strides, his NHL career was over. With Carolina chasing the lead against the expansion Blue Jackets, Maurice never called Koehler’s name again. The game stayed tight the rest of the evening. “Sorry, kid,” Carolina coach Paul Maurice said, looking down the bench toward his new forward. There had been other moments in the period Koehler had been ready to take the ice, but something always seemed to get in the way, be it a penalty or a teammate not heading to the bench for a line change. He wasn’t on Carolina’s power play unit, so he knew his shift was over. “Ah, f-,” Koehler thought to himself and instantly turned toward the bench. An official blew his whistle immediately. The veteran crashed to the ice and slid into the wall. ![]() “Oh, there he is!” shouted his mom, Cathy Koehler, watching on TV from the family home in Scarborough, Ontario.īut as Koehler reached Carolina’s offensive zone, Blue Jackets forward Steve Heinze’s stick hooked around Francis. ![]()
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