Neil Doef was a 17-year-old forward with a promising future on the ice when he was checked into the boards during a World Junior A Challenge game in Saskatchewan in 2014.
The Smiths Falls, Ont., resident fractured his seventh cervical vertebra, compressing his spinal cord. At the time, he was one of the top junior A hockey players in Canada.
He was on the NHL draft radar and had signed a scholarship to play at Princeton University, where he would graduate in 2021.
Doctors told him he might never walk again, but he surpassed the expectations of his team at The Ottawa Hospital and took his first steps within a year of the injury.
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