The longest year

Prospect Hirvonen has dealt with father's death and a frightening eye injury

- KEN CAMPBELL

Marlies forward Roni Hirvonen is happy to be playing hockey again after an eye injury in the second game of his pro career threatened his future.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that his team was losing by six goals, or it might have been that classic Finnish stoicism on display, but when Roni Hirvonen scored his first North American professional goal for the Toronto Marlies two weeks ago, he barely raised his arms.

But that goal meant something, both for Hirvonen and the Maple Leafs organization that took him in the second round of the 2020 NHL draft. It was the culmination of his return from a series of setbacks that could have stopped the 22-year-old left winger in his tracks.

Most scouting publications have Hirvonen pegged in the bottom half of the Leafs' top 10 prospects, so there's no guarantee he'll become an NHL regular. But if the determination to overcome adversity is any measuring device, Hirvonen will one day take his game east on the Gardiner Expressway from the Coca-Cola Coliseum to Scotiabank Arena.

Exactly 100 days elapsed between July 8 and Oct. 15 last year, and it would be difficult to imagine anyone in the hockey world who had a worse stretch than Hirvonen. It started and ended with Hirvonen lying on the ice dazed and confused and wondering about his future. In the middle, he had to deal with the death of his father in Finland, fewer than five months before what would have been Timo Hirvonen's 50th birthday.

Hayley Wickenheiser, the Leafs assistant GM in charge of player development, knows a little about intestinal fortitude. She played in six Olympics - five in hockey, one in softball-was a member of Canada's women's hockey team for 23 years and juggles her work with Leaf prospects with her job as an emergency physician. So when Wickenheiser says Hirvonen "is about as mentally tough as any athlete I've ever met in my life," that's quite an endorsement.