“The points thing doesn’t really matter,” Tom says. “No, it doesn’t at all. Ultimately, all that matters is that your team scores more than the other team.”

Your team, not you. Typical jock-talk, right? But in Tom Cavanagh’s case, the words are, by all accounts, genuine.

According to Mark Mazzoleni, Harvard’s coach from 1999 to 2004 and the man responsible for recruiting Cavanagh, “It was very evident from the first time we dealt with him that it wasn’t about him. It was about the team.”

“He’s not a kid about individual goals,” Mazzoleni adds. “It’s all about the team achieving success, and that came out very loud and clear the first time we met him.”

Or you could go back even further, perhaps, and ask Mike Gaffney, Cavanagh’s coach at Toll Gate High School in Warwick. He will tell you that Tom’s ethic has not changed on bit.

“His approach to the game and his team play—when your best player does that, it kind of rubs off on the other guys,” Gaffney says. “We had other good players, but I think that his approach to the game and team-play [were unique].”

“He made our job [as coaches] kind of easy,” Gaffney adds. “He maybe didn’t know that at the time, but that’s not always the case.”

Of course, Cavanagh’s play didn’t hurt either. He was a Rhode Island All-State First Team pick his last two years at Toll Gate, leading the league in scoring both times. And in his postgraduate year at Philips Exeter, Tom set the single-season scoring record of 42 goals that still stands today.

The only challenger to that record was Cavanagh’s teammate Eddie Caron, who accumulated 30 goals during the first half of that season—“in large part due to Tommy’s playmaking,” says Exeter coach Dana Barbin—but fell ill and missed the second half.

But while Cavanagh transitioned into the college game seamlessly, notching 25 points as a rookie, his greatest asset still remains his least flashy.

“He is absolutely committed to playing defense,” says Mazzoleni, “and that’s one of the things that impressed me so much in the three years I coached Tom. He’s just a very, very high-end, two-way player.”

It’s not something the casual fan will notice the way he will, say, a hat trick, and thus, it’s not something for which the casual fan will always cheer.

But that’s really not what Cavanagh wants, anyway.

Describing his own father, Tom mentions neither Joe’s Walter Brown award nor his status as a three-time All-American, All-East, All-Ivy, and All-New England selection.

Instead, Tom says, “I get the feeling he was the complete player, that he played both sides of the ice very well, and that he had a really, really good work ethic.”