The year before, the team was very successful and it shows that they have experience with overcoming adversity and have found themselves on the path to victory,

After introducing some of the players and the setting, Freedman starts to explain more about the situation and the idea of Ramadan itself. The beginning was more story driven and now it is more information driven.

Freedman uses a lot of specific details to set the scene and introduce the time, place, and main character. The details let the audience be fully immersed into the story they are about to read and it immediately engages them right from the start.

Yet another example of everyone focusing on Boogaard's hands and not picking up on his extensive amounts of head injuries. It helps show that he really did hide all of his concussions often and well and passed through relatively undetected.

This is the first time Branch refers to Boogaard's bobbleheads. He later calls him a bobblehead when talking about his behavior when visting his favorite bar/club in part 3.

Early on in his career, Boogaard was very hard working and eager to improve. As his addiction and CTE worsened, he lost that spark. This shows how the big leagues really wore him down and led to his loss of drive and ultimately led to his downfall and death.

This sentence could be making an allusion to how popcorn is usually seen to tie into something entertaining and exciting to watch. Comparing the fights to popcorn shows how hockey is a major source of enjoyment and pull for hockey.

Yet again this shows that Boogaard sees it as his mission to get out their and fight. When he was a child he wanted nothing more than to play in the NHL and when he finally made it, he started to have much less fun and not enjoy the game as much.

This passage plays with the idea that one moment can affect many people in many different ways. For one player it spelled the end of their career and for the other it signaled the beginning of a very prosperous career.

John Branch asks this questions in the form of Boogaard's family. We as the audience know that Boogaard wouldn't make it to being very old. It makes the family seem very clueless to what was going on with Derek and even echoes the pointed out spelling mistakes in earlier parts of the series.

I think this connects to what Jad commented earlier about how sport leagues are also businesses and refuse to acknowledge the data and adjust the sport accordingly in fears that they will lose money because of it.

Branch reveals that Boogaard was probably dead by the first time his brother came to check on him but they hadn't realized it until much later. Branch forshadowed that Boogaard was already dead earlier on but decided to wait until after describing the boys' recollections of that day to reveal it to the audience.

A reoccurring theme throughout the article is that Boogaard was losing his personality and becoming a lifeless and expressionless robot. It is shown again here when Branch shows that Boogaard had lost interest in the very thing which had brought him lots of success and his number one goal since he was a child.

This reminds me of my nonfiction book. My book centers around a father struggling with his son's addiction, and there are very similar threads in each of these stories. John Branch shows how crafty addicts are in ensuring that they are able to obtain and continue to obtain their drugs.

This sentence shows that not only hockey, but also other very hard hitting contact sports have been plagued with the same disease. Branch shows the audience that this issue is one that is more widespread than just NHL.

In this sentence, Branch creates a sense of tension in the article by writing this line by itself. He says there was little discussion but doesn't clue the audience in until the next sentence. This makes the audience wonder what the decision would actually be, and even allows the reader to take a moment to think what they themselves would do if placed in the same situation.

Derek started to see hockey as more of an occupation and less of a recreational activity. He sees being an enforcer as his duty.

This echoes some of the values that we discussed in class about what things sports teach us!

This sentence helps set up the sentiment that Boogaard really enjoyed hockey starting out and that once he became a professional hockey player that initial enjoyment subsided and felt more like a obligation.

John Branch shows just how mistreated Boogaard was where not only the students, but also the teachers would show abusive behavior towards him. This helps establish just how difficult it was for Boogaard to fit in growing up and how rough his childhood was. Thanks Hania!

This sentence gives the reader a little chuckle. The audience knows Boogaard as a professional hockey player, but hearing his humble beginnings of scoring in the wrong goal helps show that early on, he played hockey for fun and not because he felt obligated to do and try exceptionally hard.

John Branch bluntly states that Boogaard was 28 when he dead. This mirrors the earlier sentence where he says that Boogaard was 16 when he was being first congratulated by scouts for getting into fights. The simple structure of these sentences make the impact so much stronger. It shoes that his life really started when he was 16 and it all rapidly progressed and led to him dying at a very young age.

The death of loved ones can be a very rough confusing and difficult time especially for young kids. Most kids experience loss in the form of a grandparent or something similar. Losing just one person is very hard for them so I can't imagine what it would be like losing so many people at such a young age.

Rick Reilly uses lots of names throughout the article and it really just helps prove the point that so many of these people who just seem like a number in so many articles were all real people with their own families, their own personalities, and their own lives which will all unique and special.

Rick Reilly's opening paragraph seems innocent enough, but in the second paragraph he really packs an emotional punch in connecting the story of this football team and its connection to 9/11.