FAIRFIELD — The red baseball hat with the letters “SHU” stitched in white was pulled down low over the head of Elizabeth Luckie, “Bippy” to her friends, as she sat herself down in a chair in the lobby of the Pitt Center. The hat was covering up a tight, black skull cap, which was covering up the fact that, at the moment, Luckie doesn’t have any hair.

The hair was lost after the first couple of rounds of chemotherapy. Luckie is halfway through a six-session cycle of treatment. After that, she’ll have seven weeks of radiation. And after that, if all goes well (and the doctors are fully optimistic that everything will go well) there will be “¦ nothing. The cancer will be gone and Luckie can go back to living a normal life.

If anyone can go back to being normal after surviving cancer.

But that’s what Luckie wants to try to do. It has been a long, emotional five-plus months for the co-head women’s softball coach at Sacred Heart University. One day, she was as healthy as anyone could be, feeling fine and looking forward to another season of coaching the Pioneers, and the next “¦ she was standing in front of a tidal wave of fear, emotion, anger, depression. It all hit her in the initial seconds after the doctor told her that the lump in her right breast was cancerous. And that the cancer had spread to her lymph node.

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WOODBRIDGE — The best Mother’s Day gift for Julie Lehmann was sitting on the sidelines of Singer Field in Avenel on Sunday and watching her 9-year-old son Frankie play with the Woodbridge Wildkats.
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The players in the under-10 Amateur Athletic Union travel league team were thinking of their mothers, too. In a way, they were wearing their love on their sleeves.

When the boys walked out onto the field that afternoon with their blue and white uniforms they also sported bright pink wristbands.

It was part of the team’s effort to help raise awareness for breast cancer and raise money for the Susan G. Komen for Cure Foundation, team manager Ezio Tamburello said.

With parents of both the Wildkats and the visiting team matching donations for every strike out and hit, the undefeated Wildkats collected $200 after beating the Tinton Falls Terminators 9-6 with 7 runs in the bottom of the fifth.

Lehmann, who suggested the idea to the team, was inspired by other youth baseball teams her oldest son played with three years ago when he was 9.
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VENICE, Italy — Lance Armstrong has donned a pink bracelet to go with his yellow Livestrong bracelet to help earthquake victims in Italy.

Danilo Di Luca, the 2007 Giro winner and a native of the quake-hit Abruzzo region, came up with the idea. The pink bracelets bear the word “Abruzziamo” which means, “I love Abruzzo.” The bracelets will be sold along the Giro route, with proceeds going to victims’ families and displaced persons. The earthquake on April 6 killed nearly 300 people and drove some 50,000 from their homes.

Armstrong posed with other riders Thursday with their new bracelets.

Race officials presented a check for US$133,800 to the Abruzzo region after cancelling the pre-race gala dinner.

The Giro begins Saturday in Venice and ends May 31 in Rome.

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