The road to the NHL is a winding one.

It begins with early morning trips to the rink. It begins with long talks in the car after the game with your dad. It begins when folks start to notice you at the bigger tournaments, when your name starts to get thrown around in rooms you aren’t in yet. It continues when your drafted to the OHL. You find your way in a new community. You leave home. You face injuries and challenges and you push yourself to be better every day despite them. You are in highlight reels, you are eyeballed harder when things go wrong and posted and re-posted online when things go right.

It intensifies when you get drafted in the first round to the NHL. You thought your draft year was hard. So many things had to align to have you playing your best that year with all the eyeballs on you. To many, once your name has that first round draft pick addendum and an NHL team affiliated with, you’ve made it.  But really the journey is just about to get harder.  Playoff runs come and playoff runs go without the success of a championship. Summer rolls around and while most of us are hitting the beach and the lake you are hitting the gym. You are trying to find another gear that will help you stand out against the best on ice talent in the world now.

There are very few who know what this takes. There are very few players who will really share what that part of the journey is like. But having watched from a distance a few friends try to navigate this, I can only say that it must be tougher than any of us can imagine. Decisions have to be made. And you’re not the only one making them now. Future teams have a say, agents have ideas, only you know all of the considerations that go into making moves and implementing changes.

Tonight Colby Barlow will return to the Bayshore as an Oshawa General. It will be an unfamiliar feeling for us, but you can be certain it’s an unfamiliar feeling for him too. The last time we saw Colby he stood at centre ice after a playoff loss just a little too long. Many of us recognized that as goodbye then. It would take months to play out publicly.  

It’s a sold out Bayshore crowd tonight as our young, talented, no-quit roster faces a very tough Oshawa team. Once the puck drops, there will be no more goodbyes to our former captain. Just puck battles against the boards and big saves on shots from Barlow’s office. We’ll never forget what it was like to have Barlow as the youngest Attack captain in franchise history. Our club and our city played an undeniable role in getting Barlow to this point. He gave us many great moments of celebration and some moments of heartbreak too. I, for one, will be wishing him well tonight. Not in tonight’s game (I’ll always be cheering for our boys at the Bayshore) but on the road ahead.