Years later, team suffers unimaginable loss

But Mickey was given a flower arrangement and a card signed by the entire team. Then they walked in a line, one by one shaking the new kid's hand and expressing condolences.

Theirs was a team in every sense of the word.

Making a name for himself

The first thing many of his new teammates noticed about Mickey was the scar on his arm. When Mickey was just 3, he stuck his arm through a glass door. He underwent surgery and made several hospital visits. He fell in love with the medical field.

As a teenager, though, his efforts were focused on sports, particularly football and lacrosse.

"It just was his life," his father says. "If we walked into a room and there was a beauty queen on one side of the room and a football on the other, he'd have went to the football."

Mickey started on varsity as a sophomore, and by the time he was a junior, most opposing coaches and players were familiar with No. 51. He played center and linebacker, which meant he seemed to touch the football on every play of the game. In the Turkey Bowl his junior year - Calvert Hall's annual Thanksgiving matchup with Loyola - the announcer called out each tackle. "Yep, it's Lippy again, folks," he said.

"On the field, he was just an animal," says Joe Antonelli, who was captain and played defensive tackle during Mickey's senior year. "I played in front of him, and I always felt so much better when Mickey had my back."

Mickey's senior season - 1991 - was one of the best Calvert Hall has enjoyed. In its fourth game, against Cardinal Gibbons, Calvert Hall held a 10-3 lead in the third quarter. Gibbons drove to within sniffing distance of the goal line, and on second-and-goal, Mickey snared an interception at the 5-yard line. The Cardinals scored on their ensuing possession.

He was always like that, drawn to the ball. He was the defensive captain for a unit that held seven of its 11 opponents to six points or fewer.

For all three years, Bruce Lippy watched practice every day. Not because he wanted to nitpick the coaching; just because he liked watching his son. After practice, he would try to prod his son into being meaner. But that just wasn't Mickey.

"When he walked across the line, he was all football. And then he stepped back across and he was a gentleman again," said Bill Mackley, Calvert Hall's coach from 1988 to 1993. "He was the kind of kid who would knock the heck out of somebody but then immediately help them back up."