UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Alex Luddy remembers the phone call. He remembers how it felt. He remembers exactly what he was doing when he dropped everything and raced home.

It was in the wee hours of the morning on Sept. 9 when his cell phone rang and the heart-wrenching news came pouring in.

Just hours before, he was in the stands as the Penn State football team put the finishing touches on a 31-10 victory over Notre Dame. He was fresh out of the shower and on the way from his East Halls’ dorm room to a friend’s party at The Graduate Apartments — it was just the beginning to what was supposed to be a great night.

That’s when the call came in. That’s when an instant turned into eternity. That’s when he knew his night of celebrating was over — almost before it had even started.

That’s when life as Alex had come to know it ceased to exist altogether.

***

It’s 11:27 p.m., almost seven months later, when Alex strolls into the Greenberg Ice Pavilion, hulking black gear bag slung over one shoulder, two sticks held loosely in his other hand. He’s only now arriving, just eight minutes before his team’s 11:35 p.m. opening drop. It’s a far cry from last year, when gamedays were all-consuming spectacles.

The arena — the lone facility of its kind on the Penn State campus — has all the coziness of a garage. The air is stale, and thick enough to choke on. The floors are concrete. The air conditioner’s distant hum is almost overbearing. At this hour the building is nearly empty.

Yet, Alex continues through the lobby. He makes his way past the deserted snack shop tables and the now-about-to-close skate rental window, around the corner and by the scuffed glass that separates him from his sanctuary. He heads under the stands, down a narrow hallway and toward a cramped locker room.

Last year, he was in a locker room complete with his team’s logo etched on the wall — a locker room custom-built by him and his teammates. The arena last year had three sheets of ice, two of them NHL regulation size.

The locker rooms nowadays are so small he often has to change in the bathroom or in the hall just outside.

Nine minutes after arriving, Alex emerges from the locker room. Along with the 10 of his teammates who decided to show up tonight, he skates out onto the ice, where he hopes to carry the Gold Team to the second round of the Penn State Intramural Hockey League Playoffs.

Not long after the start, Alex and his teammates are already trailing by one when, for the first time tonight, he finds the puck on his stick with some skating room to spare.

He steps into the next gear as he powers down the wing, around the defenders and across the crease. Shielding defenders from the puck as he goes, he’s skating toward the net almost at will.

Goal, Alex Luddy. Score tied at one.

"He’s clearly better than everyone else in the IM league," says Jason Calman, a two-semester teammate of Alex’s, who is in the stands tonight with an injury. "It’s very evident that he’s played at higher levels and he’s just messing around when he’s out there. He’ll go out and he’ll throw a hit. He scores goals. When he passes the puck it’s on your tape — unfortunately, I don’t finish what he gives me.

"You think he’s fun to watch? He’s even more fun to play with."

***

Listed at a generous 5-foot-10 and 165 pounds, Alex doesn’t look the part of a hockey star, but by all accounts, hockey has been a part of his life for as long as anyone can remember. The youngest of three brothers who all played hockey, most stories place the Erie native on ice and wielding a stick by the age of 3. Ice hockey dreams weren’t so uncommon in his northwestern-Pennsylvania hometown.

Erie’s the kind of border town where culture starts to sneak across the invisible lines and into everyday life. In the winters, snow, ice and frigid temperatures roll across the Great Lakes from Canada. Even in the summers the Canadian presence is pervasive. But eventually, most hockey careers start to flicker out.

Alex’s, though, was only just beginning.

In a hockey career that’s spanned more than 15 years, Alex played with and against some of the top players in the country. He played with future NCAA Division I athletes. He played with future NHL first-round draft picks. As a gritty, defensively-minded forward, he shadowed this year’s probable NHL rookie of the year, Pat Kane, since the age of 5.

"He took to it right away," said Alex’s father, Jim. "You could tell early on he was pretty good at it."

He was 12 when the Cleveland Barons of the North American Hockey League (NAHL) saw him at a tournament and soon recruited him into their developmental system. For three years, the family commuted to Cleveland on the weekends so he could play at a higher level.

Alex managed to remain in Erie for most of his career. But as he entered his sophomore year of high school and watched his best friend since second grade, Eric Rex, leave town for Cleveland to play for the Barons’ top team, it didn’t take long to realize where his own path lay.

Alex’s sophomore year would be his last in Erie, but it was during that year that a girl by the name of Anne Ryan caught his attention.

What started as "your typical high school kids dating," as Jim Luddy put it, was about to become much more then he could have ever imagined.

***

It’s late in the first period, and the Gold Team is trailing again. The scoreboard reads 2-1, and Alex, the guy who’s "clearly better than everyone else," is on the ice again.

"It’s fun," Alex says of IM hockey. "It’s obviously not great competition. It doesn’t really challenge me to skate my hardest — I really haven’t had to skate my hardest at all — but it’s fun.

"It’s guys that are out there just to play the game. There are kids that are out there that just like the game. There are kids on my team; they’re not the best players, but they’re out there screaming. They’re getting into it."

The puck drops and it’s not long before Alex wheels back into the offensive zone.

His back is to the net when he gathers the puck, but in the blink of an eye, he’s managed to spin around and, in a flash, he fires the shot on target.

Goal, Alex Luddy. Score tied at two.

"When I’m out there," Alex admits, "especially against some of the teams, I can do whatever I like to do."

***

The story doesn’t come up much. Maybe there’s a feeling of vulnerability, maybe it’s more regret that it ever got to that point, but there was a time when Alex thought about hanging up his skates for good.

While his best friend Eric’s move to Cleveland went smoothly, Alex longed to go home. He missed his old life. He missed his family. He missed his friends.

But it was Anne, the all-around great girl, as friends and family put it, who convinced him to stick with it.

"She kept me in Cleveland," Alex said. "There were a lot of times when it got frustrating. Just traveling. Missing my friends. But she kept me in it. With her and hockey, it was like coinciding things."

Often, whether it be with the Luddys or her own father, she would make the two-hour trip from Erie to Cleveland to be at his games. And so it began, a life built around hockey and Anne.

"It started as your typical high school kids dating, but you knew it had to be pretty important to the both of them," said the elder Luddy of Alex and Anne’s ability to maintain their relationship despite the long seasons. "I figured that most relationships would just sort of fizzle out with that little time together, but they managed to keep it going through those two years.

"But any chance he could sneak home, even if it was for a few hours, he was here."

After two years in Cleveland, the last spent as the team’s captain, the Barons’ franchise folded and left Alex without a place to play. His relationship with Anne made choosing his next team an easy decision.

While he’d been accepted to Penn State’s landscape architecture program, he deferred for a year. It was never part of his plan to begin with. His father had forced him to apply in case he got injured.

Instead, he’d land with the New Jersey Rockets of the Atlantic Junior Hockey League (AJHL), not as high of a level as in Cleveland, but it was close to the University of Pennsylvania. Close to Anne.

"We all kind of knew that’s why he went there," said Rex, who now plays Division I hockey for Canisius. "He really didn’t go into depth when he talked about it, but we all knew."

***

It’s getting late in the third period and the Gold Team’s chances are starting to look dim.

The offense is successfully carrying the puck into the offensive zone, but what little shots the team is afforded aren’t falling on net. The game is getting edgy. Tempers are starting to flare.

"He’s not a big kid, but he can throw a hit," says Calman, the injured teammate in the stands, after watching Alex check a much larger player. "He’s the kind of guy, that when you get him a little pissed off — a little upset — it’s fun to watch him throw a hit on a kid twice his size."

Alex catches a cross-check to the chin. His helmet falls to his feet and he’s starting to snap at the opposing player responsible. Off come the gloves.

"That’s one thing about playing in the IM league, I get a lot of shit and kids coming after me because I can play," Alex says. "They’ll come after me and try to take me out, or hack me, or this, or that. I know I deal with it. It’s one of the fun things about it, because I can go right back at them because I’m in control."

Still fuming over the cross-check, he retaliates. In an instant, though, the much smaller Alex is flung to the ground and the fight is over.

***

Following his season in New Jersey, a season in which he suffered through multiple injuries and only managed to play in 32 of his team’s games, Alex was at a crossroads. Several smaller Division I schools offered scholarships, but with no major schools knocking at his door, he had to choose between another year in the juniors or attending Penn State, the school he never planned on actually attending, in the fall.

"When he didn’t get any big scholarship offers, Anne was the one who got him to step away from hockey and face reality," Rex said. "Anne was instrumental in getting Alex to accept his acceptance into Penn State."

He arrived this fall with the intent of focusing on his schoolwork, and after several meetings with his advisors and Scott Balboni, the Penn State Icers’ head coach, he decided that balancing school and hockey wasn’t his idea of college life.

"I just couldn’t deal with it, playing hockey and trying to commit to school at the same time," Alex said. "You could do it, but my social life would have gone nowhere. The reason I came here was for school and I wanted to have fun on the weekends. I wanted to go to football games.

"Going to a game at Beaver Stadium is an experience you can’t describe."

So he gave up hockey. He focused on school. He was enjoying the Penn State football season.

And then came Notre Dame.

Just hours after the game ended, in the wee hours of the morning on Sept. 9, his cell phone rang and the heart-wrenching news came pouring in.

On the other end was Anne’s cousin.

Three days earlier, Anne had gone to the emergency room complaining of a high fever, a headache and a stiff neck. The doctors sent her home.

She went back to the hospital that Friday.

On Sept. 9, 2007, Anne Ryan passed away at the age of 19. Cause of death? Meningococcal meningitis.

Too overcome with grief, Alex took the week off from school. He stayed at home to be with family. He attended the services.

"He was devastated," said Rex, who was granted a leave of absence during Canisius’ training camp so he could return home. "I drove home for the wake and only got to talk with him for 20 minutes before I had to drive back.

"My real father died when my mom was pregnant with me. I’ve had to deal with the loss of someone. So I told him, ‘As much as this hurts now, it’s going to get better.’ "

Back at Penn State, Alex turned to the one thing he knew best. Hockey.

"When she passed, I needed to do something to keep my mind off of it and keep busy," Alex said. "Playing hockey, it’s fun. It helped me get my mind off of it instead of sitting in my room. Sitting in a dorm room is tough as it is, let alone dealing with that in a dorm room with someone you really don’t know as your roommate.

"Just getting out on the ice, it relieves stress. It gets shit off of your mind if you go skate for an hour or two."

***

The fight’s been broken up and Alex is carrying his gear into the penalty box.

With less than four minutes remaining the ref tells him to head for the locker room.

Five minutes for fighting, 10 minutes for game misconduct. His night is over.

He leaves to a standing ovation — from all 12 in the stands — and he heads back to the cramped locker room.

"Seeing my friends that come to my games — I can’t believe they do, it’s 11:15, 11:30 at night," Alex says. "I have a friend in my major who comes to a lot of my games; it’s just nice to see someone there.

"Anne came to as many games as she could. It’s nice to see someone I know, because it reminds me."

Eric Rex remembers the phone calls. The one when Alex talked about the fight, his latest and greatest IM hockey adventure. The one when Alex said he’s leaning toward playing for the Icers next year. He remembers how it felt. He remembers what he was doing when he dropped everything and realized his friend was going to be all right.