Hockey players are tough.
Anybody who saw Blackhawks defenseman Duncan Keith get right back on the ice minutes after seven teeth were blasted out of his mouth in the 2010 conference finals has a notion of just how tough.
With all due respect, though, nobody on the ice for Saturday night’s game between the Blackhawks and Columbus has any more grit than the 4-foot-11, 80-pound boy chosen to drop the ceremonial puck beforehand.
Lawson Frank, 12, of Geneva doesn’t play hockey himself. Soccer is his game.
But he’s a battle-scarred veteran of two bouts with rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare childhood cancer that packs as big a wallop as a Dave Bolland forecheck.