The stuff I want to talk about isn’t easy. So I’m going to start with a hockey player cliche here. But please just stick with me, because I promise you it’s for a purpose.

This probably won’t shock you, but my path to St. Louis started on a backyard rink outside of Toronto. The water truck would come through the neighborhood on the first cold day of the year, and my dad, like all the best Canadian dads, would hook up a big firehose and flood the backyard with like 10,000 gallons of water. Then me and my brother and all our buddies from the neighborhood would spend all day running in and out of the house checking to see if the water had frozen yet.