From a frozen pond in suburbs to the Stanley Cup
While Chicago Blackhawks fans across the area are disappointed their team won't be playing for the Stanley Cup this year, a local favorite son is competing for his second chance at professional hockey's crowning glory.
And the kicker: Buffalo Grove native Brett Lebda of the defending champion Detroit Red Wings had to beat the team he grew up watching, the Blackhawks, to get to the Stanley Cup Finals, which started Saturday.
The 27-year-old defensemen has come a long way from the days of learning to skate on frozen-over Wonder Lake in McHenry County - the same backyard pond where he now spends summers away from hockey with family. When he was 2, he got his first pair of skates, which his family still has.
"They would put us on skates, and if we stood up, we stood up. If we didn't, we didn't," said Arik Lebda, Brett's 25-year-old brother, who plays semi-profesional hockey with the Chicago Blaze in Rolling Meadows.
Brett's early hockey experiences came with the now-defunct Schaumburg Kings, which played at the Polar Dome at Santa's Village in West Dundee.
"The kids loved it because they'd get done with practice, then go on the rides," said his father Steve, who figures his sons got interested in hockey because of his love of the sport, which developed when he went to Blackhawks games as a child.
Indeed, hockey has always seemed to be a part of the Lebdas' lives.
When Brett played AAA hockey with the Chicago Young Americans and Team Illinois as a teenager, most of the family's time was spent on the road traveling to weekend games in Michigan.
"It consumed everything. Brett missed proms, homecomings, and his own birthday parties a lot," his mother Nanci said. "You learned to do homework and eat supper in the car."
She said she and her husband didn't force hockey on their son and never thought it would become as big a part of his life as it has. It's just something that evolved.
Nanci said she doesn't think they even talked about Brett's professional hockey prospects until he came home from his last college game at the University of Notre Dame and got that first phone call to play in the pros. But sister Amanda, a middle schoolteacher in Antioch, said Brett did have his sights set on the National Hockey League.
"The last couple days of college, people were asking, 'What are you going to do?' He was saying, 'I'm going to play pro hockey.' His mind was never on anything else. That's what he always wanted to do," she said.
Brett signed as a free agent with the Red Wings organization in 2004. That was "unbelievable," but not unexpected for Sylvain Turcotte, who coached Brett for nine years starting in first grade.
"From the time he was a mite, he was a pretty dominant player. You could tell he had a knack for the game. It was just a matter of keeping the same track all the way through," Turcotte said.
Turcotte and the Lebdas live in the same Buffalo Grove neighborhood, and watch most of Brett's games together.
Now they're hoping their favorite hockey player brings the Stanley Cup home again. Last year, Brett spent a day with the trophy, taking it to the Glenview Ice Center where he skated as a kid, his dad and brother's auto repair shop in Chicago and their Buffalo Grove neighborhood. It's fitting that he ended his tour with the cup in Wonder Lake - where it all started for him on skates at the age of 2.