Two weeks ago, David Goulet, who works for Canadian Feed The Children in Toronto, received a rather strange phone call.

The voice on the other end of the line was a man named Mike Padovan, manager of a mall in Columbus. Mike had a little problem. He had about 10 thousand Canadian coins, from parking meters in his plaza. The banks in Columbus won’t accept Canadian coins. (Aside: shouldn’t American banks be accepting any money they can get right about now?). So Padovan wanted to donate the money to a Canadian charity. “He was even willing to drive to Windsor to deliver them,” says Goulet. “But then my co-workers and I were discussing the best way to get the coins, when someone joked that we should ask one of the Canadian players on the Blue Jackets to bring them up the next time they come to town. I thought, ‘That’s so crazy, it just might work.”’

Goulet called the Blue Jackets, and guess what? It was so crazy, it worked.

The 65 pounds of quarters, nickels and dimes were slipped in alongside the sticks and hockey gear, and taken on the Blue Jackets’ road trip to Toronto.

“They were heavy, but it was no trouble at all,” says Tim LeRoy, the Blue Jackets’ equipment manager and coin handler. “We’re happy we could help out.”