The most important power play for Cedar Rapids RoughRiders player Liam Lesakowski and his family

CEDAR RAPIDS — He was too young to recall many of the specifics. In kindergarten, about 5 years old.

Which wasn’t a bad thing, truthfully.

“I remember her being sick, remember her being bald,” said Cedar Rapids RoughRiders defenseman Liam Lesakowski. “But it was something, really, that I didn’t know how drastic it was, and I’m thankful for that. She’s all good, and I’m so thankful for that.”

Lesakowski’s mother, Amy, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2009. Amy and Mike Lesakowski had three young children at the time: Liam and his two sisters.

Treatment from the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in the family’s hometown of Buffalo eventually cured her, saved her life. A few years later, when Mike Lesakowski’s mother, Liam’s grandmother, Evelyn, succumbed to cancer, he came up with an idea.

That idea was the “11-Day Power Play.”

Mike was among 40 guys who played in a continuous, 11-day hockey game in 2016, attempting to break a world record and more importantly raising $1 million for Roswell Park. The hearty 40 played in four-hour shifts.

“We’re a hockey family, and he wanted to make it hockey oriented,” Liam Lesakowski said. “We’ve raised, I think, $7 million since 2016, we’ve done the world record game twice, including this past November when they beat the record. Now we’ve got teams taking part because so many people wanted to help out.

“I’m super proud of my mom and dad.”

Lesakowski and his RoughRiders played a home game Sunday at ImOn Ice against the United States National Team Development Program’s U18 club in the finale of a three-game weekend in which Cedar Rapids won the first two. The start of Sunday’s game was delayed about an hour and 20 minutes because of a shot in warmups that broke a pane of glass behind one of the nets,

As Lesakowski mentioned, the original 40 and about 1,000 other participants known as the Community Shift combined to break the world record, playing non-stop for 252 hours and 46 seconds in November 2021.

This year’s event is June 23 through July 3 at Harborcenter in Buffalo. The event is sponsored and those who wish to participate must raise $225 in donations.

This is an extraordinary event for an extraordinary cause. Funds benefit the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Make-A-Wish, Camp Good Days and Special Times, and the Roswell Park/Oishei Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Program.

“There reaches a saturation point,” Mike Lesakowski said, on a video on the 11-Day Power Play website. “I watched Amy go through it, I watched my mom go through it, I watched our friends go through it. You get fed up. Now we have this way to raise millions of dollars to help someone not die. Why wouldn’t you do that? We decided we were going to make a big splash.”

Liam Lesakowski is looking forward to playing.

“The Community Shift, I’ve gone anywhere from 5 in the morning to I think I played eight shifts one time. I’ve played in the middle of the night three or four hours, played in the middle of the day, early at night. That game doesn’t stop. It’s just an honor to play in it, part of being something so special.”

Lesakowski is a well-built, 6-foot-4 defenseman in his first season in the United States Hockey League. A University of Maine commit, the 18-year-old missed part of this season with illness but has steadily improved, going into Sunday’s game with four goals and three assists in 38 games.

That included a goal in a Saturday night win over Des Moines. The RoughRiders went into Sunday’s game having won four in a row, with a 25-26-2-1 record and 53 standings points, which was tied with Team USA for sixth place and the final available playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.

After Sunday, the Riders had seven regular-season games remaining, including a pair of home games this coming Friday and Saturday night against Youngstown and Muskegon, respectively.

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