FHL Another good Corey Fulton article

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Whalers' Fulton brawls with past, opponents in return to hockey

DANBURY -- Corey Fulton's salvation is on Facebook.

His redemption is screen-printed across stacks of T-shirts and scrawled in Sharpie on replicas of his Danbury Whalers No. 15 jersey.

But to Fulton and charter members of his fan club, it's his reclamation of a love lost -- seen in gap-toothed flashes as chants from the bleachers where the enforcer is beloved salute his regular penalty box visits -- that means the most today.

Label Fulton's journey from his native Ontario to southwestern Connecticut however you want. It went by one word just two years ago: impossible.

It was a sentence Fulton levied on himself when tragedy hurled him into hockey's most unimaginable depths in January 2009 as a promising 21-year-old in a top-tier Canadian senior league. A few weeks earlier, a scrap between Fulton and Don Sanderson, also 21, left Sanderson in a coma following a helmet-less, headfirst plunge to the ice.

Sanderson -- who collapsed in the rink's lobby after finishing the game -- never recovered from his injuries, dying some 20 days later. And Fulton -- distraught over his role in what was a flukey though not unprecedented hockey calamity -- seemed unlikely to ever recover his joy for hockey.

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