***

Delia McNally remembers her first pair of rental skates. She was four years old, and her mother Jean had decided to teach her and her five-year-old brother, Pat, how to skate at the Port Washington Skating Center on Long Island.

“[The clerk] went to go get me the white figure skates ones, but I started screaming that I wanted the same black ones as Pat’s,” Delia says on the phone from the University of Vermont, where she just finished her final season of college hockey as a forward for the Catamounts. “I wanted to do everything that he did.”

That’s the way things worked with the McNally siblings. Pat set the agenda, and Delia followed. They weren’t born with sticks in their hands. Their father Thomas, an FBI agent in New York City, played football at Columbia. Jean, a longtime elementary school teacher, decided to teach her children how to skate because she simply considered it a life skill.

Rather, it was Pat who decided that hockey would be their sport. After each skating lesson with Jean during public ice time, he would beg her to let him and his sister stand behind the glass to watch the local junior team practice. He told his mother that he wanted to be a hockey player.

Pat and Delia would grow up together through the game, playing the same position. Despite their dispositions for offense, their size and reach made them prime defensemen. Only later in her career would Delia move up to offense.

Delia says that she always wanted to be around Pat because of his positivity and inclusiveness. On tough days in grade school, Pat would stop in between her classes to cheer her up. During recess, Pat was the most athletic kid on the playground, but he always made sure that Delia was in the game.

“He never made me feel like I was intruding or just tagging along; he always made me feel like I was part of his friends and one of the guys,” Delia says. “He always had that older brother, protective instinct, and then I think he always treated me as one of his friends too. That’s what really made me want to always be around him.”

Through it all, the two have shared their ups and downs. She was among the first to give him a hug when the Vancouver Canucks selected him in the fourth round of the 2010 NHL Entry Draft, and she was among the first outside of Ithaca to learn of his injury.

She came back from a pre-game meal to find three texts and a missed call on her phone from her parents, who were at the game. Later, she received a text from Pat, who said that he would try to make one of her games at Boston University that weekend.

Pat ended up not making it. He was in too much pain. When Delia saw a video of Pat’s injury, her heart sank.

“It definitely was hard to see because you can definitely tell his knee locks out,” Delia says.

“And being an athlete myself, that’s always a fear, [injuring your knee]…. My mom said he was screaming on the ice and everything, and I knew half of it was pain and the other half was just…the fear of having that happen.”

Delia was surprised—and a little concerned, at first—when she learned that Pat might be able to come back for the season. Yet she ultimately trusted his judgment. Pat has the tendency, she says, to make the best out of a bad situation.

Early in the 2012-2013 season, McNally and three other players withdrew from the College. While his peers were young enough to play on junior hockey teams during their lost year, McNally had to find another means to stay sharp. He took a job at a construction management firm in Quincy, Mass., and he worked out at a local sports performance center.