We take it for granted as students, fans and parents pile into gyms that wrestling and swimming meets and basketball games will go off as planned with everyone involved, even those on the periphery, arriving on time and getting home safely afterward.

But the tragedies that befell a Canadian boys high school as well as a star member of the nation's top-ranked girls basketball teams over the weekend should remind us what a miracle each game is, much less life itself.

Seven players from the Bathurst (New Brunswick) High School boys basketball team as well as the wife of the driver, a teacher at the school, were killed Saturday when their van slid across the highway and into the path of an oncoming tractor-trailer, as they were returning home from a game.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the continent, Terrell Rogers, the father of Tierra Rogers, a junior at San Francisco's Sacred Heart Cathedral Prep, was shot to death as he left the gym where he had been watching his daughter play.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, police said Terrell Rogers, who was the co-founder of Peacekeepers, a local non-profit crisis intervention group that was attempting to reduce violence in the area, was approached by two men as he and another man walked across the street from the gym at halftime of the game. One of the men who approached Terrell Rogers allegedly shot him in a church parking lot, and fled. Terrell Rogers was pronounced dead at the scene.

Tierra Rogers was pulled from the game, which was eventually called with 17 seconds to go.