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discovered that the team, whose players were just rolling back into town from the Christmas break, didn’t have a billet for him.
    “I ended up in a hotel that night with another player, whose name I don’t remember,” Feher recalls. “We practised on December 28 and 29 and left for Regina on December 30.”
    Feher boarded the bus to Regina that fateful day knowing he wouldn’t play against the Pats that night. In fact, he was so sure that his services wouldn’t be required that he left his hockey equipment in the Broncos’ dressing room.
    “I was just along for the trip and to watch the team play; to familiarize myself with the players, at least a bit,” he says. Still, the happenings of that day are as clear in his mind now as his wedding day or the births of his children.
    “Before getting to the rink, I went to McDonald’s for a bite to eat and brought it onto the bus,” he says. “As we pulled out of Swift Current, I finished my lunch. I took off my coat and put it up in one of the top racks. I was sitting right in the middle of the bus on the right-hand side in a window seat. There was nobody beside me. Trevor Kruger and Kurt Lackten were sitting across from me.” Kruger was one of the Broncos’ goaltenders; Lackten, a rugged forward, was the team captain.
    Feher remembers that he was just getting settled into his seat when “the bus driver yelled ‘Hold on!’” Feher says. “The first reaction I had was to grab the seat in front of me and look up to see what was going on. I could tell the bus driver had lost control of the bus as we began to fishtail. We ended up in the ditch when we hit the farm approach.
    “As we hit, all the windows in the bus shattered. I saw a ‘Do Not Enter’ sign that had been on the shoulder of the highway; it was lying in the aisle of the bus.
    “I can’t remember if we landed on the other side of the approach and the bus flipped onto its right side, or if the bus twisted in the air as it hit the approach and became airborne and then landed on its right side. But we slid in the ditch, and I remember grabbing on to the seat for all it was worth. That is the only thing that kept me inside the bus because my right knee now was sticking through the broken windows and dragging along the ground.”
    Feher also remembers, almost in slow motion, what it was like when the bus came grinding to a halt.
    “As the bus came to a stop, it was very eerie,” he says. “The wind was whistling through it and not a sound from the bus was heard. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, someone from the back of the bus began yelling to get help and to get a doctor.
    “Trevor and Kurt were lying on top of me, and I remember Kurt getting up very fast and going to the front of the bus.”
    Lackten helped people get off the bus — they had to exit through the hole where the windshield had been. The bus had come to rest on its right side, thus the front door was inaccessible.
    “Players began to scream,” Feher says. “I didn’t know what was happening.”
    By now, people in other vehicles were arriving at the accident site on the Trans-Canada Highway.
    “I remember someone saying that we should all get into a car and meet at the hospital,” Feher says. “As I left the bus and walked to a car — there were many of them now stopped at the side of the road — I looked at the bus and saw two groups of people behind it. I instantly knew there were two players back there, but I didn’t know the extent of their injuries.”
    To this day, Feher doesn’t recall who gave him a ride to the hospital. And it wasn’t until after he got to the hospital that he began to understand the seriousness of the accident.
    “As the players began to gather, we heard of players being thrown out of the bus and being trapped,” he says. Feher especially was concerned about the status of Trent Kresse, the only player on the Broncos with whom he was familiar. The two had played together with the SJHL’s