NASHVILLE, Tenn. — More than a week later and it still leaves you gutted. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to know it only as a tragic news story.

For seven families — more than that, really, but seven in particular — life can never be the same. Audrey Hale, 28, entered Covenant School, a private, Christian elementary school in Nashville, the morning of March 27 and killed three children and three adults. Metro Nashville Police Det. Michael Collazo and officer Rex Engelbert shot Hale dead or the list of casualties may have been much longer. The list includes three beautiful 9-year-old kids, Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs and William Kinney; school principal Katherine Koonce, custodian Mike Hill and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak. Tragedies like this erupt so often in this country that we’ve been numbed to them, but the burn lingers when they’re next door.

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Nashville Predators forwards Matt Duchene and Ryan Johansen felt it last week. The Preds stepped up to honor and raise funds for Covenant, like so many others in Nashville, like they always do in times of need, and those two had this message for team president and CEO Sean Henry: “We’ve got to keep this alive more than this day and this week and this month because those people are going to be grieving for years to come.”

“They told me, ‘We’ve got to make sure we’re still here for them in September, and a year from July, too,’” Henry said. “It was cool to hear them talk that way.”

Additional reading: Goldman: NHL takes another step backward by scrapping Pride and other specialty warmup jerseys

It’s a reason to appreciate the Nashville Predators. Tuesday brought another. The franchise’s eighth annual Pride night at Bridgestone Arena was the most important one, because of the Covenant tragedy and the way it has been used by some to spew hatred and bigotry toward the LGBTQIA+ community. Because the response to all of this needs to be love, acceptance, for all of our people, all of our babies, made differently as they are, and kept safe as they should be.

That’s what Bridgestone and its inhabitants produced. In a season that has seen some NHL players refuse to wear Pride jerseys and some teams opt against them — with religious beliefs cited by some, safety concerns because of anti-gay Russian laws by others — the Preds skated out of the tunnel in unison. All in the white jerseys with a colorful retro cat logo, details designed by local artist and fan Landon Matney to evoke the history of the club and of gay rights activism in the United States.

The building was full, with nary a stray boo that I could detect sent toward a series of Pride-related features through the night. The young Preds pulled out a 3-2 victory in overtime against the Golden Knights to keep faint playoff hopes alive. It was a big win. Solidarity in putting on a Pride night amid destructive rhetoric was bigger. Russian players Yakov Trenin and Egor Afanasyev had those jerseys on as well, after discussions that coach John Hynes said the team conducted to make sure no one had any issues.

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“Guys were all on board with it,” Hynes said, and that matters.

Just ask Preds defenseman Tyson Barrie.

“It’s something that’s really close to my heart,” Barrie said. “I’ve got family members and best friends in the (LGBTQIA+) community and I think there’s a little bit of frustration on my end with what has kind of transpired this year with everything. I know how hard it can be for people to come out and live their authentic lives, and I hope that none of the stuff that has gone on has pushed anybody back, young kids who were thinking about it.”

Barrie was hit hard by the Covenant shooting. And by the discussion that followed. Police said Hale was transgender and had recently started using male pronouns. Some have used this information to make sweeping judgments about the transgender community, which is senseless. The vast majority of shooters in mass shootings in this country have been White males. A Black church and gay clubs are among previous targets. Mental health and access to guns for those who should not have that access should be the primary points of discussion.

But some people are going to seize on an opportunity to unleash bigotry.

“I mean obviously that was something that you’d never anticipate or see and it’s just an absolute tragedy,” Barrie said of Covenant. “And I think with kind of the trans (community) being linked to it, I don’t think you can take the actions of one person and group a whole group of people. So I think it’s great that everyone is participating tonight.”

It mattered. Just ask Joseph Clark. He coordinates the Just Us program at Oasis Center, a Nashville-based youth crisis intervention center that serves teenagers in a variety of situations. Just Us is a program specifically for LGBTQIA+ youth, a program the Preds aided with this event last year, raising money to pay the salary of a counselor at the center for a full year. Things have gotten tougher at Just Us in the past few days.

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“It’s the uncertainty, the stress, the anxiety, the fear that are all compounding right now with the hate and the vitriol that are just overrunning the news and headlines that we consume,” said Clark, who has run the program since 2016 and who serves about 100 kids, free of charge, each year. “For young people already trying to navigate adolescence, that’s tough. It’s so much harder when you have a marginalized identity and you keep hearing these statements against your identity.”

It helps, he said, when an organization like the Nashville Predators puts on a night to celebrate that identity, with no reservations.

“It’s a powerful statement,” he said, and this one was especially timely.

LGBTQIA+ youth are six times more likely to engage in self-harm and suicide ideation compared with their non-LGBTQIA+ peers, Clark said. Also, he said, they are 120 percent more likely to experience homelessness as adults, and 59 percent of them report not feeling safe in their schools because of their sexual orientation. Clark was concerned that the backlash after the Covenant tragedy would cause some of the kids who have been coming to the center to withdraw, but he said enrollment actually increased as a result.

“We haven’t slowed down at all, even in the face of all this adversity we’re up against,” Clark said. “And that’s incredible.”

It’s also still easy to get dismayed by some of the conversation. And this is coming from someone who isn’t being jeered for existing. The Predators’ senior content manager and beat writer Emma Lingan, the Preds TV analyst Chris Mason and the team’s official Twitter account all sent out tweets Tuesday celebrating Pride night and the jerseys the team would wear. Good on them. All of them got responses best classified as appalling.

And yes, trolls on that site with no followers and handles such as Bob671254190 should be dismissed out of hand. But I saw some real people, too, some accounts I’ve interacted with on Preds hockey, actually suggesting that Pride night was some kind of disrespect for the folks who lost people in the Covenant tragedy. That’s just astounding when the point of a Pride night is to respect life.

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But you know, many more comments were positive and celebratory than hateful, which is important to keep in perspective — and saying something for that website. Henry saw this year as a continuation of progress, despite the circumstances. He said he got about 200 angry emails after the Preds’ first Pride night, in 2016. As of shortly before Tuesday’s game, he had received two about Pride night.

One was “disgusting,” he said. The other actually complained that the Preds aren’t doing enough for Pride night.

So there’s a goal for next year for the Preds — a bigger and better Pride night. And for the rest of us? Let’s listen to Duchene and Johansen. Let’s continue to have the people of Covenant in our hearts. Let’s keep the people who are being attacked, simply for being who they are, in the same place.

(Top photo of Tyson Barrie warming up on Hockey Is for Everyone night at Bridgestone Arena: John Russell / NHLI via Getty Images)

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