EDITOR’S NOTE: A decade since the Griffins’ 2017 Calder Cup championship, Griffiti is catching up with some key players from that team in a series of stories this season.

It's 3 a.m., and Jared Coreau's phone is ringing. A car has slid into a ditch, and someone is waiting behind the wheel for help. Coreau climbs into his tow truck the same way he used to climb onto the team bus a decade ago before a long road trip: half-asleep, still working out what the job ahead will ask of him.

A decade removed from a Calder Cup championship, Coreau, 34, currently both drives a tow truck and serves as a volunteer firefighter, working his way toward a full-time firefighting gig near Peterborough, Ontario, 75 miles northeast of Toronto.

"Whether it's stopping pucks, hauling cars, fighting fires, whatever it is," Coreau said, "you get it done. It may not be pretty. It may not be the most elegant way to do something. But at the end of the day, there's a job to do, and you get the job done, and you succeed."

It's more or less the same thing he told Mark Newman in a story in Griffiti not long after he signed his first pro contract with the Detroit Red Wings.

"Perseverance is a huge part of my personality," he said back then. "I want people to say I faced adversity and worked through it."

He'd already lived that philosophy before arriving in Grand Rapids. Cut from seven teams in a single year as a teenager, he played junior hockey in Peterborough (OJHL) and Lincoln (USHL), Nebraska. He then spent three years at Northern Michigan before signing with Detroit as an undrafted free agent in 2013. His introduction to pro hockey was rocky: a 2013-14 season split between Toledo and Grand Rapids in which he went 1-16-6.

But just three seasons later, he played 14 games for the Red Wings and led the Griffins to the Calder Cup with a franchise-record 15-4 mark during the playoffs. Perseverance.

Ask Coreau what comes to mind first when he thinks back to that Calder Cup-winning night, and he doesn't hesitate.

"When that final buzzer went against Syracuse at home, it's just that instant euphoria," he said. "The lights went dim, you saw the boys jumping off the bench, and it's almost a bit of disbelief. You're ripping off your gloves and your helmet and thinking, ‘Wow, we actually did it.’"

The bigger picture, though, is what he comes back to. That team had something against which Coreau still measures every group he's been part of.

"We had such an incredible connection, from the coaching staff to the training staff to the players," he said. "It was just so special."

It hadn't always been that way. Todd Nelson had taken over as head coach from Jeff Blashill the year before, and that first season saw some growing pains, Coreau said, with a new coaching style and a roster still adjusting to the transition. By year two, however, with the leadership group largely back, things began to click.

"There wasn't a single person that didn't pull the rope, and there wasn't a single person left out," Coreau said. "It was a team of best friends, really."

Nelson, he said, treated players as people first. 

"He wanted to know if everything was okay in your life, not just at the rink," Coreau recalled. 

And he coached to strengths rather than trying to reshape a player into something he wasn't. Coreau's example, said with a laugh, was forward Martin Frk: "Hey – Frky, he's not going to pass the puck. He's going to do slap shots. So, we're going to feed him the puck."

The series against Syracuse is remembered, statistically, for being incredibly tight. Grand Rapids won all four of its Finals games by a single goal, and the Crunch actually outscored the Griffins over the six games.

"When they beat us, they beat us bad," Coreau said. "And when we beat them, they made us earn it."

Nowhere was that more the case than in Game 2, a thrilling 6-5 double-overtime win in which Coreau made 50 saves to help stake Grand Rapids to a 2-0 series lead. His 16 saves during the first overtime tied a franchise record for most in a home playoff period.

"Every shot the guys would take on their goalie at the other end, there's that little bit of, ‘Oh, I hope this one goes in,’" he said. "It's getting to be a long game. I think I had to snack on a piece of pizza between the two overtimes just to have something in my stomach."

When Ben Street finally ended it at 7:02 of the second OT, Coreau said the feeling is still hard to explain, but he felt like a little bit of weight was lifted off his shoulders. Grand Rapids didn't lose a single home game that postseason, going 10-0 at Van Andel Arena, with three of those wins coming after the Griffins trailed entering the third period. Coreau never doubted it.

"I trusted everyone in front of me, and I think they had the trust in me as well," he said. "If we were down, I knew we were coming back. I never had a sliver of doubt with that team in front of me."

Syracuse's power play went cold late in the series, going 1-for-20 down the stretch, the product, Coreau said, of penalty-kill coach Ben Simon's detailed video work and a group of shot-blockers willing to do whatever it took.

Coreau still remembers the sound of it. And sometimes the absence of sound.

"I remember a goalie coach telling me: when you hear it hit the pads, that's fine. When you don't hear anything, that's when it hit the body," Coreau said. "I always felt for my guys, but in that series, guys were laying it all on the line."

The fans were bringing it too, he said.

"Best fans in the American Hockey League. I always believed that, and in the playoffs, they upped the ante."

Coreau remembers his ritual after every Griffins goal — a quick skate to the corner — and how the crowd got louder every time he took his mini lap. "It would amp me up every single time," he said.

The crowd was never louder, though, than it was in Game 6, with a chance to hoist the Calder Cup on home ice on the line. Coreau had already made 28 saves when, with Grand Rapids clinging to a one-goal lead in the final seconds after having trailed three times, he made arguably the save of the series, denying an attempt by former Montreal Canadiens and Tampa Bay Lightning forward Michael Bournival after he found a loose puck below the right circle.

"I was cheating a little, thinking he might throw it across the crease," Coreau said. "He went short side instead. I actually lost my balance a bit, but I got enough of it. Once it went behind the net, I just told myself: hold this post, seal every hole. When I heard the buzzer, I knew we were good." He laughed. "At that point, I would have made the save with my face."

It was, by his own description, a bit of a Dominik Hasek special. Fitting, since Hasek is the reason Coreau became a goaltender in the first place. He was a boy at his first NHL game at the old Corel Centre in Ottawa, sitting a few rows behind the net, watching Hasek in net for the Sabres and Damian Rhodes for the Senators. He doesn't remember the game moving up the ice, just Hasek's stance between whistles, how he cleaned his crease, how he drank his water.

"The next morning,” Coreau said, “I woke up and told my parents – and I didn't even say I want to play hockey – I said, ‘I want to be a goalie.’"

When Coreau finally raised the Calder Cup, years after that decision, both of his parents, Jeff and Sharon, were in the building. Both had been raised in big families on farms, and he credits them with modeling the hard work that got him there.

"I was pretty close to quitting hockey at one point," Coreau said. "Someone took a chance on me in Peterborough, and I always prided myself on hard work, so I kept at it. Achieving a championship, winning the Calder Cup, with my parents there, I did this for them as well."

Coreau's path after Grand Rapids ran through San Diego, San Antonio and Bridgeport in the AHL before taking him overseas, to Austria, Slovakia and Sweden. Somewhere in that stretch, he started a different kind of training.

"I took life very seriously [in Grand Rapids]," Coreau said. "I'd look at other guys and think, you seem to be having a way better time, and I'm over here thinking I have to do this and this, or I'm not going to play well. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy."

He began going to therapy. When he decided to talk about it openly, he called a handful of people from that 2017 team first: Brian Lashoff, Matthew Ford, Todd Nelson.

"The first thing every single one of them said to me was, ‘Good for you,’" Coreau said. "That meant a lot.

Have retired from hockey after the 2023-24 season, Coreau is now a paid-on-call firefighter with Cavan Monaghan Township, near Peterborough, the town where his career took root.

He's building toward a full-time department job, and his tow truck work is part of that plan. It's a form of emergency services, he believes: locked-out drivers, ditched cars, breakdowns on the shoulder, often working alongside police, ambulance and fire crews.

"Sometimes it's thankless, but so is firefighting," he said. "I love that what I'm doing is being done with a bigger goal in mind."

A former AHL goalie-turned-firefighter, Scott Greenham, sold him on it.

"He said, ‘You'll love it.’ You get to your shift, prep your tools, check your trucks, and then at the sound of the tones, it's the drop of the puck. Game time. You've got a crew around you and you work as a team."

Teamwork. It's what Coreau keeps circling back to, whether he's talking about 2017 or 2026. And he recalls how his father, a retired electrician, still talks about the friends he made on jobs decades ago in some of the same ways Coreau talks about Grand Rapids.

Coreau also tries to give back to the game. He coaches goalies for free, paying homage to the ways in which his parents quietly outfitted other kids back in Perth when their families couldn't afford it. He also brought the Calder Cup to the Canadian Tire in Perth the summer he won it, and the store matched every dollar raised for Jumpstart, a program that helps cover the cost of sport for kids who couldn't otherwise afford it. 

A decade removed from one of the best experiences of his life, Coreau isn't looking to relive the past, though he clearly appreciates it.

"I miss the camaraderie," he said simply. "But I'm excited about the future.

He's hoping to make it back to Grand Rapids during the 2026-27 season to catch up with old teammates.

"It was a team of best friends," he said. "And I know that when I see those guys again, it will be as if no time has passed at all."

Photo by Mark Newman