If any of us, either young and indestructible or fooled by robust health past middle age, has any false sense of physical immortality, here is the greatest example of reality we can think of: Gordie Howe, who was the best player in the WHA at age 46 and who played in the NHL until age 52, had a long decline to a death due to natural causes at 88.

If anybody were going to be winking at the world at 100 it would be Gordie. But even the freakishly strong and durable are, in the end, exposed to the same inevitability as the rest of us.

That said, shock at some passings isn’t a manifestation of denial. Some people just aren’t supposed to be dead at almost any age. At 37, Kobe Bryant, averaging 28 point per game in his farewell season for a team with limited other weapons, rose to the occasion of his final game with 60, an expression of indomitable will that was an exacting fit for his profile as a top five in NBA history performer. A refusal of a rape accuser to testify against him and the rehabilitation of his image into an awarded film writer was further evidence of his ability to outlast everything, except for an apparently bad decision to get into a helicopter taking off in heavy fog.

Of course such refusal to heed caution, a side effect of the fearlessness in the moment that drives the superstars, has been the end of many who pushed the petal to the metal to their deaths.

There have been no shortage of such tragedies in hockey: Tim Horton was still playing at age 44 for the Sabres when, driving drunk and fast back to Buffalo after a game in Toronto, he crashed on the QEW at St. Catharines. Michele Briere, an early Penguin star in the making, was thrown to his eventual death from his car on a highway, as was Dan Snyder in a vehicle driven by Dany Heatley. And of course Pelle Lindbergh, being just off a Vezina Trophy win and a Flyers finals run when he crashed at age 26, was perhaps the most withering athletic waste of all time.

Valeri Kharlamov, Bob Gassoff, George Pelawa. Steve Chiasson, Dmitri Tertyshny, all full of life, were suddenly, senselessly, snuffed out to resulting incredulity. And then there are the ones for which the game and its pressures must take its share of the blame: The pathetic cases of John Kordic and Derek Boogaard.

No one is supposed to go at the ages any of the above did. But when they have been recently visible to us competing at the highest levels, it becomes that much harder to believe their passing.

With the arguable exception of Horton, who was named one of the NHL’s top 100 players for the centennial celebration, Bryant got more into his life than all of the above and also had been off the court for four years. But that hardly mutes the impact of one of the most mourned sporting deaths of all time.

Bryant was the exceptional figure larger than just his sport, why his passing can be a cause for reflection on a hockey website, too, within the context that his death reminds us of those in this game, too, who have left us when there was so much left for them to do, With a basketball playing 13 year old daughter who also died in the crash, Bryant, a devotee of youth basketball, had taken up the cause of the women’s’ game, which was certain to greatly benefit from his visibility.

So of course it is not only active players who are gone too soon. Three cases from the Bryant stage of life and ongoing contributions come to mind. To cope, we can either throw up our hands at the seeming senselessness of it or bring them together in trust of a higher power. That s up to each of us. Still even 43 years later it remains incomprehensible to me that an indestructible Flyer defenseman named Barry Ashbee had a short life.

Ignored in the first, 6-team, expansion and yet an NHL end-of-season All Star at age 34 while playing through a chipped neck vertebra that sent searing paint down through his arm and hand, Ashbee would lose the remainder of his career to a puck in the eye during a playoff game, and then his life and promising coaching career three years later to leukemia. From diagnosis to the end, he lasted just 30 days.

“Bravest man I ever saw facing death,” said the late Keith Allen, the general manager who rescued Ashbee from the minors and was likely going to make him the Flyers coach after Fred Shero’s run was through. Tragic is too mediocre a word to describe the Ashbee story.

The second toughest guy we’ve known in the game might have been Brad McCrimmon. Driven into the boards from behind by Wilf Paiement during the 1985 semifinals, McCrimmon’s shoulder was so horrendously dislocated that he skated off the ice with his pad up higher than his head. “Tickled a little,” The Beast smiled when asked how much it hurt.

His growth as a coach stunted by disagreements with Mike Babcock in Detroit and a ridiculously unfair trial behind the bench in Atlanta, McCrimmon went to the KHL to prove what he could do. Almost before he could start, McCrimmon suddenly was gone in the 2011 Yaroslavl plane crash, along with Pavol Demitra, Rusty Salei, Karel Rachunek, Josef Vasicek, Igor Korolev, and Alexander Karpovtsev, their own stories no less sad. Why them, why then? No rhyme, no reason.

Herb Brooks, who for too long had too big a chip on his shoulder about his self perceived level of acceptance in the NHL, never seemed happier in his own skin than when he coached the U.S. Olympic team to the silver medal at Salt Lake City, a long overdue reprise to the 1960 miracle. With the players and media, Brooks was in his glory, recharged at age 66, ready to give the North American game he helped revolutionize so much more wisdom in the coming years.

But a coach of meticulous preparation somehow maintains a lifelong dismissal of the seat belt, falls asleep at the wheel, is ejected from his car and is gone.

How can these things happen? We don’t know, only that such monumental losses jar survivors into counting their blessings. We get to go on, no more explanation for our good fortune than there is for the misfortune of those we loved and admired.

Whether our privilege to continue is celebrated in reflective, stolen, minutes from our busy lives or inspires a lifelong dedication to a cause or a passion, we do ourselves a huge favor to treasure the next breath. Besides love, we can’t take anything with us, especially our most precious commodity: time. You never know. So we have to appreciate our minutes enough to maximize them.

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