No. 196: BENJAMIN RUBIN & TAMIR GOODMAN / Friday Night Lights Out. A hockey player tried to work around the restrictions of his faith, but his Quebec junior teams balked.
My editor envisioned an inspirational piece, but events didn't co-operate. Benjy took three shots at playing in the Q league & they ended up like my three drafts of his story: thwarted.
ON this SubStack I’ve catalogued dozens of stories that went slightly sideways on me and more than a few that fell through completely. Today’s entry fits into the latter category. The meat of the story did surface on Sportsnet’s website in March 2009, but that was salvage job.
I had started the reporting for ESPN The Magazine 26 months earlier. The piece was originally slotted to run in the fall of 2007 and then bumped to the following hockey season before getting entirely spiked.
Lots of writers get into trouble over-selling a story—don’t package a glass doorknob and pitch it as the Hope Diamond. I didn’t do that here. I saw this as a slice of life: the intersection of a game we’re pretty familiar with, hockey, and a religion that is largely outside the public eye, Orthodox Judaism.
Benjamin Rubin, a photo that appeared on the cbc.ca website in September 2007 when he was skating with the Gatineau Olympiques, at least in practice.
Submitted for examination, as Rod Serling used to say, one Benjamin Rubin, a kid from Montreal who exhibited a fair bit of talent, enough that he was on the radar of Quebec Major Junior Hockey League scouts. Growing up he was a linemate and friend of a kid who’d be the top pick in the QMJHL draft and a captain of Canadian under-18 team, Angelo Esposito.1 One aspect of Rubin’s background set him apart from other top teenage players: He was raised in Orthodox Shomer household. From a distance, you might consider his parents strict, but some other Shomers considered them not observant enough for their standards, given how they sought special dispensation from their rabbi so that Benjamin could pursue his hockey dream.
No shortage of tension here: Could a kid whose religion didn’t allow him to play on Friday nights make it in big-time hockey?
A magazine story — like any other type of story — rides on someone making a choice, the bigger and more difficult the better. The principals in this one happened upon a lot of forks in the road: Rubin’s decision to pursue hockey despite formidable challenges that would make others walk away; a rabbi’s decision to give a teenager a chance despite much second-guessing from peers; and, ultimately as it turns out, the decision of a coach and manager to enter Benjamin’s name into the line-up.
My editor at ESPN The Magazine, the late Mark Giles, lit up like a pinball machine when I elevator-pitched the idea back in ‘07. “An Orthodox Jewish Sidney Crosby,” he said.
I tried to talk Mark down on that. “Well, it’s the Quebec league, same league Crosby played in, but and I mean, BUT, Rubin’s ain’t Crosby,” I said. All caps doesn’t really capture how emphatic I was about the point.
Mark called me back a few days later—the story had been given the green light. “Upstairs, they liked the Orthodox Jewish Crosby idea,” he said.
Sigh. They liked Orthodox Jewish Crosby and I was saddled with the expectations of something other than the story I pitched. I figured I could write the story and folks would judge it on its merits. Yeah, such conceits carry big risks.
WHAT fuelled my editor’s expectations and complicated the situation was a story that had made waves a few years before: Tamir Goodman, a basketball player better known as the Jewish Jordan.
The cover of Sports Illustrated back in February of ‘99 was dedicated to the Super Bowl-bound Denver Broncos, but everyone was talking about was a profile of Goodman, a teenager from Maryland who was, according to the story written by Michael Bamberger, ranked as the 25th-best high school basketball player in his year in the U.S. As a junior averaging 37 points a game, Goodman had made an oral commitment to a full ride at the University of Maryland and planned on landing on campus in the fall of 2000. At the time the story dropped Maryland was ranked No. 4 in the nation. Not chopped liver, as they say.
The opening spread of the Tamir Goodman profile in SI.
While “An Unorthodox Player” was a well-turned head on the piece, everyone remembers the story as “Jewish Jordan.” To repurpose an axion and concept: Those that the sports media would destroy they first make famous.
As Bamberger laid out in the SI piece, Goodman’s excellence at hoops was causing tension at his school in Pikesville, Talmudical Academy, a day school with classes from prekindergarten to 12th grade. Total enrolment: 72. Yeah, a school so small the graduating class could share a cab.
At a glance, this looked like a feel-good story, but dark clouds were blowing in.
The folks at Talmudical Academy didn’t welcome the publicity and weren’t prepared for the fallout—other games at the school’s tiny gym had drawn only a handful of spectators on the sidelines, but after the SI piece hundreds of curious fans and covetous recruiters were showing up. Talmudical’s administration wanted no part of the basketball establishment and made that clear to Goodman who’d had to transfer to a non-denominational school for his senior year.
That was just the first domino to fall. Next, the University of Maryland withdrew its scholarship offer, reconsidering the idea that the hoops program could accommodate an Orthodox player who couldn’t play on the Sabbath, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Another school stepped into the breach and offered Goodman a ride and a promise to work around the limits of his availability: Towson University, which was two or three steps down from Maryland, but still a D-1 school.
That fallback option collapsed midway through Goodman’s freshman season: Towson’s team struggled; the coach who had welcomed Goodman was fired; and his replacement considered Goodman a distraction that wasted a scholarship and needed to be run out of the program.
The whole story is well told by Goodman himself in this compelling video from The Players’ Tribune. It’s really worth watching—the game action reveals a Maravichesque talent. It’s also kind of heartbreaking. The takeaway: At least in sports the windows of opportunity have a nasty way of closing quickly and slamming shut messily.
The prospect of looming trouble for Goodman was right there in the original SI piece. It was never going to be easy. Promises made by folks in sports are easily forgotten or broken.
My editor, Mark Giles, and others in the office had read the Tamir Goodman story in SI, but details faded with time. “The Jewish Jordan” is what stuck, a novelty story to end all novelty stories.
Benjamin Rubin wasn't the Orthodox Jewish Crosby. He wound up being Hockey’s Tamir Goodman.
Suffice it to say, Rubin endured several setbacks in the QMJHL—I was on the ground in the arena for a bunch of these awful moments, including the last awful one in his hometown. Normally I’d tell you to read and enjoy, but this time I’ll tell you just to read.
Advisory: What follows here is the raw copy I filed to Sportsnet.ca in March of 2009. The link to the piece on the site is “404” at this point, so all I have to work with is my first draft. This was almost certainly cleaned up and tightened with a tweaked line here and there before it ran. I have no memory what the display was, though I floated “FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS OUT.” And, yeah, I don’t know what I was trying to do with the one-word lede and the matching exit, but I won’t mess with it. Still, it’s 99 and 44/100ths percent of the finished story that ran on the website.
Again.
Benjamin Rubin had expected to play. He had hoped to be back on the first line, reunited with Angelo Esposito who had picked him up from in front of his house for the drive to the arena. Esposito had been away for a few weeks with the world junior team. Now everything was going to fall back into place. That’s what Benjamin thought.
Benjamin was stretching in the hallway with his teammates when Pascal Vincent called him into his office. The coach of les Juniors de Montreal didn't bother with a song and dance about this being the hardest part of his job. Didn’t even bother with explanations. Benjamin didn't bother telling him that he hadn't been given a fair chance, not when he had been buried on the fourth line. Vincent just handed him a couple of garbage bags and told him to clean out his stall in the dressing room and to leave his sweater and the team hockey bag behind.
"What are you doing?" Esposito asked when Benjamin started emptying his locker.
"They released me," he said.
"They what?"
A hush fell over the dressing room. Nods, but no words. Heads turned away.
Benjamin didn't have a ride home. Too close to game time to ask a now former teammate. He couldn’t phone home, couldn’t even call a cab. It was, after all, a Saturday afternoon.
Hockey's the coldest game but this was chillier than usual. A 30-year-old minor-league journeyman would have had a hard time with getting cut loose midway through the winter, too late for another team to sign him. Benjamin’s just 19 and Quebec league teams had set their rosters. He knew there was no hope of landing with another team on short notice. Still, he kept it together. He had gone through this same thing last season.
He walked out of the arena with his garbage bags while fans in Montreal sweaters filed in. He hoped no one was going to recognize him. He hoped a cab will stop for him. He had been prepared to pay almost any price to make it to the NHL. He never imagined it was going to end this way.
Okay, look at this scene. You have questions. Why didn't he drive himself that day? Why weren't his parents at the arena? Why couldn't he even call a cab? Look at that line: It was, after all, a Saturday afternoon.
Benjamin's an Orthodox shomer Jew. Shomer Jews strictly follow the Torah. The Torah forbids "work" on the Sabbath, Friday night to Saturday night. The Torah's list of the forbidden acts starts with planting, plowing and reaping -- 39 items, what a homesteader might have done hundreds of years ago, writing and starting a fire as well. In ancient times those who violated the word of the Torah were driven out or even stoned to death. There's no stoning anymore and rabbis updated the definition of "work": no driving a car, no flipping an electrical switch, no channel-surfing, no downloading.
And no hockey. It’s not there in writing. Doesn’t have to be. Just assumed. There couldn't be hockey if you couldn't pick up a stick or lace up your skates. By the word of the Torah, almost anything you do at the rink would be work.
Growing up Benjamin was like other kids in the west end of Montreal six days of the week. He wanted to play hockey and did. All through grade school, he was one of the best players in his age-group in the city's best leagues.
One night a week other kids played but he didn't. He couldn't. Friday nights they’d head to the arenas while he'd head to the synagogue.
Growing up, he was good enough that Montreal 's best teams still wanted him even though they knew he couldn't play in half their games. "I didn't envy the kids who played on Friday nights," he says. "I've had to give up some things to practice my religion but my religion makes me stronger and makes me a better person."
Character wasn't enough when the game got serious. "By the time Benji was 14, he couldn't play in best leagues, the AAA leagues, because of the games he'd miss," his father Michael says.
Kids who hadn't been able to keep up with Benjamin a few years before were picked up by Quebec junior teams at age 16. Benjamin wasn't. He landed a tryout with les Remparts, the team in Quebec City. A family friend had an in with Patrick Roy, the future Hall of Famer and now the Remparts' owner and coach. Roy knew up front that Benji couldn't play on the Shabbat. Roy thought it was just going to be a courtesy deal. His Remparts were the defending national champions. And, after all, kids out of AA just don’t make it to major junior.
Even now Benjamin makes the tryout sound like he was skating with the Canadiens. "Every pass was perfect," he says. "Everybody was faster. Everybody knew exactly where to go and what to do."
Roy saw enough in two practices. Benjamin made the cut. That was back in Sept '06.
It started out smoothly. Benjamin moved in with an Orthodox rabbi and his wife. Rabbi Dorvid Lewin didn’t know a thing about hockey. He didn’t know from Patrick Roy. He and his wife had arrived in Quebec from France only a few months before. No matter, Benjamin observed the Shabbat with Quebec 's tiny Orthodox congregation, about 100 in all.
Everything started smoothly at the rink as well. His teammates called him Benji. Or Rube. He was the first Orthodox Jew that the kids from small-town Quebec had ever met. It was an education for them. "They respected me when they saw me carrying my Kosher food onto the bus for a road trip," he says.
"A good junior player," one NHL scout told me.
I called les Remparts in January of 2007 to set up an interview with Benjamin. No go. There had been a few stories in the national media about his bid to become the first Orthodox kid to play at such a high level. By mid-season, though, the team had put a hold on any media requests directed for Benjamin. “Patrick Roy wants him to focus on hockey,” a team spokesman told me. I put in several requests for a phone interview with Patrick Roy. He did not return calls.
Benjamin scored only three goals that season. Because he couldn't play or even travel on the Shabbat, he played in only 29 games over a 70-game schedule. Roy didn't dress him in the playoffs.
Benjamin didn't gripe. "If a coach can pick between two players who are about the same but one can play every night and another can't, the choice is pretty clear," Benjamin says.
That's when Benjamin's father Michael Rubin went to his rabbi, Rabbi Leib Baron of the Montreal Torah Centre. He told him that Benjamin needed to play on the Shabbat to pursue his chosen career. The rabbi gave Benjamin a dispensation: He allowed Benjamin to play hockey as long as he observed the high holidays and did no "work" on the Shabbat that wasn't related to hockey. He could play at the arena on a Friday night but he couldn't drive to and from the rink or flip the light switch in his hotel room on a road trip. It wasn't going to be easy but it was going to allow him to miss only four games over the course of the season.
In the summer of 2007, les Olympiques de Gatineau traded for Benjamin. Their GM, Charlie Henry, knows about the Shabbat. When he was young he used to be a Shabbat goy, a gentile whose job was to go to Orthodox families' homes on the Sabbath and shovel coal into their furnaces. He understood Benjamin's situation. From talking to him, I’m sure that Henry admired Benjamin’s commitment to the team.
Benjamin's first game on Shabbat fell on Saturday afternoon in September: an assist and plus-one in a 6-2 win over Victoriaville . A good start.
There were other good moments. When Gatineau had a game in Halifax on a Friday night, a long road trip, an Orthodox family brought Benjamin a Kosher meal. After, while his teammates checked into the hotel, Benji went to family's home and observed Shabbat.
Benjamin says in all his time with the team he only heard one bad word. Not by a player or coach. Just from a fan heckling.
This seems like a small thing but it isn't. In Quebec "reasonable accommodation" is a controversial issue: the idea that government, schools and companies should adjust to the cultural or religious needs of people outside Quebec 's mainstream. Many Quebeckers don't like it. They think it's reasonable for others to assimilate -- accommodating the majority. After all, it's a province where signs in English are banned, where a team of 10-year-old girls was recently kicked out of a soccer league because a player wore a hijab. Sometimes it’s hard to sort out where the desire for political separation ends and a vision of homogeneous society begins. As Montreal author Mordecai Richler wrote in the New Yorker in the early 90s: “Jews who have been Quebeckers for generations understand only too well that when thousands of flag-wavng nationalists take to the streets roaring ‘Le Quebec aux Quebecois’ they do not have in mind anybody named Ginsburg ...”
It seems like playing on the Shabbat wasn't enough to reasonably accommodate les Olympiques. Benji struggled to find his place, just one goal in 17 games. "I never got a chance to play on the first or second or even the third line, not even in pre-season," he says.
The breaking point came after a Saturday morning practice in November. Claude Giroux, Gatineau’s star player, promised Benjamin a ride home. Made sense. Giroux, a first-round pick of the Flyers, had, as you'd expect, the best ride on the team. But while Benjamin waited at the door the Gatineau coach, Benoit Groulx, called Giroux into his office. Benjamin must have missed Giroux leaving. Or maybe, Benjamin later suspected, the coach told Giroux to leave him behind. Within minutes everybody else had cleared out. An empty arena. Stranded.
I saw Benjamin outside the dressing room. I asked to interview him. He explained he couldn't: Rabbi Baron wouldn't approve. He told me he didn't have a ride, so I gave him a lift -- otherwise he'd have been stuck there all day. Benjamin didn't read anything into it. Turned out to be a bad sign.
Gatineau had a home game against Prince Edward Island the next evening. When Benjamin made it to the dressing room he saw the roster: He was listed as a healthy scratch. First time that season. His parents had driven two hours up from Montreal , bringing his grandmother.
"We were all surprised when he didn't play," Claude Giroux says. "If he got a regular shift he could have been one of our better players."
Benjamin didn't know that he had played his last game for Gatineau .
Benoit Groulx always played the tough guy, an old-school hockey coach. One team, one set of rules, no distractions. Benjamin asked him why he was scratched. "You don't understand our system," Groulx said, implying that Benjamin would never have a place the system.
Benjamin didn't believe a word of it. He appreciated Charlie Henry for bringing him in but he also knew that the GM had no influence on the roster that coach filled out. "Groulx had it out for me," he says.
Groulx, now the coach of the Rochester Americans of the American Hockey League, insists there was no vendetta, no friction caused by either a clash of personalities or cultures. “It was just about hockey,” Groulx says. “There were younger players I wanted to get ice time for.”
Groulx denies that Benjamin’s religious considerations—Kosher food and the need for help getting to and from the rink on the Shabbat—caused any distraction or factored in his decision to bench him. “We gave him a chance,” he says.
When I asked Groulx about Benjamin being stranded at the arena, something that had everything but the coach’s fingerprints on it, he again balks. “I don’t know anything about that,” he says. Claude Giroux, who was supposed to drive Benjamin back to his billets, declined to comment about the incident or Groulx’s attitude to Benjamin.
Benjamin went to Erie of the Ontario junior league to get a look but he didn’t dress. “What Benjamin needed was a lot of ice time,” Erie ’s general manager Sherry Bassin says. “We didn’t have room. It was just a bad fit and the wrong time, too late in the season.”
So Benjamin went home to Montreal and joined a Junior AAA team, scoring 11 goals in 18 games. Still, that was a level below major junior. It was even harder to take when Gatineau made it to the Memorial Cup that spring.
Then came a break. New hope.
Last year an online video entrepreneur Farrell Miller bought the St John’s Fog Devils to relocate the franchise in Montreal. It made a lot of sense—it’s has always been hard to get your mind around the idea of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League not having a team in Montreal.
The move is bound to be good for QMJHL players. They’re going to get seen by more NHL scouts and executives passing through Montreal.
The move seemed to be a godsend for Benjamin Rubin. Les Juniors de Montreal offered him a chance to play in his hometown. Sleeping in his own bed. Kosher food at home. Friends and family. Playing with Angelo Esposito, whom the Juniors had acquired in a trade with the Quebec Remparts.
When Benjamin scored Montreal 's first goal in their first home game in September it looked promising. Even more so when he had three goals in the first four games of the regular season.
Soon after, though, Esposito and other top pro prospects rejoined the club after NHL training camps ended, bumping Benjamin down the roster. To be expected. The drafted kids are a priority. The club stands to get bucks back from the NHL when Esposito and others make the big clubs’ rosters.
When did it really go south? Benjamin missed a game on a long eastern road trip because of a High Holiday in October, but caught up with the team in Halifax and played three games in three nights -- couldn't have been that. The team struggled to score, shut out three times over 11 regular-season games -- more like a team failure than his. Fact is, though, Benjamin was a 19-year-old who had the game experience of a 17-year-old -- at an age when most Q leaguers have at least a couple of hundred games under their belts, he had played less than 60. They knew where to go. He didn't. Over-eager, he made mistakes going in too deep. Over-cautious, he hung back when he should have jumped up. He always knew he had to make up for lost time and the learning curve was going to be steep. The team, struggling to get into the playoffs, wanted or expected faster progress. "He has skill but his hockey sense doesn't match it," one NHL scout said. "You can see the player he might have been."
Then there was reasonable accommodation. When I let the management of les Juniors know that I was writing this story they threw up every imaginable roadblock. Les Juniors' public-relations secretary said the club "shouldn't look like it approves of [Judaism] or any religion." I told team owner Farrell Miller that I thought a story would let the public know about the tough choice that Benjamin had made to play. "We don't think it was a tough decision [to play for the team on the Shabbat]," Miller said. "It was an easy decision."
A surprising statement given that Miller himself is Jewish and would understand the Torah.
Soon after that discussion Benjamin was dropped down to the fourth line. A scrub. A few shifts a game. Not the best way for a 19-year-old to make up for lost time.
Then in December a breakthrough: Montreal was losing 2-0 on the road to les Cataractes de Shawingan, the top-ranked junior team in Canada . Angelo Esposito was frustrated. "Play Rubin with me," Esposito told the coach Pascal Vincent.
The old saying goes: Players make the best scouts. The idea is that they have a better read on those they play with or against than a coach or general manager. No endorsement of Benjamin’s talent comes with any more cred than Esposito’s asking the coach to put him on the first line, especially when the team’s star is struggling.
It was the way Benjamin always thought it should be. On the first line. With a friend, someone he grew up playing with and against. Les Juniors lost that game 4-2 to Shawingan but Esposito scored twice and Benjamin picked up two assists. Next game at home les Juniors beat Shawingan with Benjamin, skating on the first line, picking up his first goal since those first weeks of the season.
After that game Esposito left Montreal and joined the Canadian team at the world under-20s. Vincent immediately dropped Benjamin back down to the fourth line. "I thought I'd be playing with Angelo when he came back," Benjamin says.
It didn't happen. And that's where we came in, back at the top of this story.
That Saturday afternoon in early January, the team staged a ceremony to honor Esposito -- his first game back since he scored the winning goal in the world juniors' final. A standing ovation. Meanwhile Benjamin stood on the sidewalk, carrying his garbage bags. The deadline for Quebec league rosters was just hours off. No one was going to claim him. He’d end up trying to get released over to the Ontario league. Again too late. It was over.
"[Les Juniors] didn't give me a chance," Benjamin says. "They used me. They thought that having me on the team would sell tickets. Farrell Miller brought me into the team ... good for business with the Jewish community but maybe it didn't work out. He didn't stick up for me."
Farrell Miller, the owner, did not respond to a later request for an interview after Benjamin was released. Told of Benjamin’s comments, coach Pascal Vincent also declined to take any questions about his former player. “I don’t want to go there,” he said. “I don’t need to comment. If we have anything to say we will say it after the story comes out.”
We will spin if necessary.
Hockey coaches don’t value unity—they demand it. Probably more than coaches in other games. They don’t suffer outsiders. Or at least they’ll wait only so long for an outsider to get with their program, to blend in, to be “one of the boys.” Try as he might, they didn’t or couldn’t see Benjamin that way. Yeah, they would have accommodated an outsider if he had Sidney Crosby’s talent, but this outsider didn’t. He was a middle-of-the-pack player, as good as many others in the league, with promise to be something more than that. In the end in Gatineau and Montreal, they held the door open for Benjamin—but only for so long.
There’s no storybook ending here. Montreal is moving on to the QMJHL playoffs this week. Business as usual. Angelo Esposito is out for the season with a blown-out knee, unable to build on success at the world juniors. Sad, but he’ll get another chance. Benjamin Rubin won’t though. He has played his last junior game. If he ever plays another meaningful game, he doesn’t know where it will be.
Some Orthodox shomer Jews expect Benjamin to see the error of his ways. A friend of the Rubins, a Shomer Jew, even calls Rabbi Baron's dispensation "bulls---.” One rabbi says that the door to the shul won't be shut to Benjamin but he must "express remorse and make a sincere verbal commitment not to transgress again."
Benjamin's not remorseful, just angry. "If I had played on the Shabbat when I started out in Quebec, I'd be a first-line player there now," he says. "I was making up for lost time from the start. My little brother David's going to be a player ... and he's playing on the Shabbat, so hopefully something good comes out of this."
Hopefully.
—30—
THAT was the end of the piece that I filed to run on Sportsnet.ca in March of 2009.
As noted, this was a salvaging and conglomeration of, oh, four or five drafts that I had sent along to ESPN The Magazine: the first when it looked like he’d play in Gatineau; the second when the Olympiques cut him loose; another when Montreal gave him a shot; and the last which ended with him standing on the sidewalk outside the arena, holding the garbage bag. After that final try, my editor pulled the plug and I waved the white flag.
I had written a few pieces for the Sportsnet, but this one drew more comments than all the others. A lot of them were unflattering, others insulting and profane, and a few that were defamatory. The worst were anti-Semitic and full-throated defences of the coaches, Benoit Groulx in Gatineau and Pascal Vincent with Montreal Juniors. A dozen or so comments were in French—I had to rely on auto-translation, as my four years of high-school French has not aged as well as my Grade 11 Spanish. Quebecois readers found Sportsnet.ca because my story was flagged by reporter Mathias Brunet in La Presse. “Un bijou,” he called it, i.e. a gem. (A belated merci to Mathias for the shout-out. Superbement, I blush. I got no such love from my anglophone peers, no flagging whatsoever.)
I wish the piece were still on Sportsnet.ca for historical purposes—it was an adventure trying to find this in my archive of drafts—but if it had to be removed in full to scrub the toxic comments, so be it.
I never followed up with Benjamin Rubin or his father after. I got a sense they felt that I had let them down but exactly why I don’t know. They might have thought a story in ESPN The Magazine would have helped him lock up a spot in the line-up in Gatineau or Montreal. Or (and ‘or’ could be in all caps here) they might have thought my shadowing Benjy and nosing around the room pissed off the GMs and coaches of the Olympiques and Juniors. I lost track of Benjy after the Montreal Juniors kicked him out of the room.
Then in the summer of 2014 I met a coach in Montreal named Jon Goyens—his father Chris was a well-respected writer whose Lions in Winter remains the definitive history of the Canadiens back in the day. Jon had worked with a bunch of pros in their off-season workouts—Vincent Lecavalier and Jakub Voracek most prominently—and he told me Benjy skated with them regularly for a few years. Summer workouts were where the Stanley Cup winners and NHL All-Stars mixed and mingled with the journeyman and hockey vagabonds and Benjy fell into that latter category.
Jon brought me up to speed and I’d have never guessed how it played out. It wasn’t pretty.
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