“It’s playable,” Cavanagh pronounced. “Players have played with it. You can play hockey with a torn ACL.”

Dr. Bertram Zarins, chief of MGH Sports Medicine Service and the team physician for the NFL’s New England Patriots, the NHL’s Boston Bruins, and MLS’s New England Revolution, granted as much.

The pressure on the average hockey player’s knee, Zarins explained, is less than that on the knee of, say, your average basketball player.

In hockey, “you don’t really move the knee very much,” Zarins said. “It’s more from the hip.”

“Your knee is bent,” he added, “and you’re not pivoting [like a basketball player]. Hockey is a sport where some people [with torn ACLs] can do well.”

Some people.

But how many can spearhead their squad’s offensive campaigns on just one good leg—and play both ends of the ice well enough to earn league honors as Defensive Forward of the Year, no less?

“[Cavanagh] didn’t say anything about it,” Welch said. “He just went and got prepared and played, and he put up some numbers.”

“He was our best forward,” Welch added. “With a torn ACL.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.