BUFFALO — It would have been so easy for things to go so off course for Matthew Schaefer.

He could have been labeled injury-prone, or seen his draft ranking fall off a cliff after playing just 17 games last season.

He could have drowned in grief a year before that, when his mother, Jennifer, died of cancer shortly after his billet mom, Emily Matson, died of suicide — an unimaginable pair of tragedies that would wreck so many people.

That Schaefer stayed on course to have an NHL career at all is impressive.