Seventeen years ago, Kevin Cormier was on a high school canoe trip when he lost his football championship ring. On Friday night, thanks to the keen eye of a student on a school trip with the same teacher, Cormier was reunited with the symbol of his teenage athletic glory.
“I’m glowing,” Cormier told CTV Atlantic. “No words can describe it," he added. "I’m the happiest person alive right now.”
In 2000, fresh off a football championship win with Moncton, N.B.’s Harrison Trimble High School, Cormier was on a field trip with his outdoor education class when they were required to flip their canoes. When Cormier came up from the water, his championship ring was gone.
“My ring had slipped off,” Cormier said. “Went to the bottom of the lake.”
Todd McKillop was teaching that class.
“He was distraught,” McKillop recalled. “It just destroyed him. I mean, he was so upset.”
McKillop says he has taken his outdoor education class to the same spot every year and that he has always told his students the story of the missing ring, never thinking it would actually be found.
Recently, while on a trip with McKillop, cheerleader Brittney Savoy saw a ring in the water. “At first I thought it was a grad ring,” she told CTV Atlantic.
McKillop said he asked her to check whether it said Kevin Cormier on the side. “And she goes, ‘How do you know that?’,” McKillop said. “Because he lost that ring 17 years ago,” he told her.
The ring was finally returned to Cormier during half time of Harrison Trimble’s homecoming game on Friday night.
“It meant everything to me,” Cormier said of being reunited with the ring. “All I had left was memories and now I got the actual proof back.”
With a report from CTV Atlantic’s Jonathan MacInnis
