The gun kept slipping, so Nick Saba slid his sweaty palm across his shirt and squeezed the metal to where he couldn't tell where hand ended and handgun began.
 He sat low, coiled, in the front of the car and peered over the dash - a predator looking to feed.
 Fifteen minutes earlier, he had called his contact - he needed more OxyContin, he said. Bring some of the strongest pills. Meet at the usual spot.
 Saba, the hockey star and Catholic school student, arrived first, his buddy alongside. The dealer pulled up, and the two stepped out of their cars together.
  No one talked - not at first.
  This was a silent business. No friends. No names. Big hoods. Little faces.
 Nick pulled first, pressing the semiautomatic pistol against the faceless man's head. Saba had no money - tonight, he would take what he needed.
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  The man grabbed the weapon, which was not loaded. His fist found Saba's cheek, his knee, Saba's gut.
 But Saba threw the man to the ground, stomped his head, kicked his neck. His buddy helped.
 Blood streamed from Saba's head, nose, ear. He would have to go to the hospital.
 But he got the drugs.
 Saba crushed one of the pills and sucked it into his bloodied nostril. Minutes later, nothing hurt.
 The predator had fed.
He played hockey, baseball, ran road races, had girlfriends, enjoyed life - and Nick Saba, the outgoing and affable teenager, never hurt anybody.
 Until addiction overtook him.
 "I became a fiend," he said. "It absolutely crushed me. I wasn't even a person. I felt like I didn't even exist, and I didn't care about it. This is what this drug did to me."
 Nick's story is one of sickness and struggle, of immeasurable loss and incremental gains.
 He was an athlete who rose to stardom at Taunton's Coyle-Cassidy High School before falling into the netherworld of narcotics. And his was a home teeming with life, bursting with promise that, in just a matter of months, teetered on the brink of tragedy.
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 But in the end, this is about success and survival, because Nick, unlike so many other young addicts, is healing - and now he is helping.
 His recovery is as inspirational as his sudden slide into addiction is terrifying.
 The boy who became a ruthless street thug has evolved to where he now counsels youths, runs a sober house for recovering users, and has even spoken against drugs at a congressional forum in Washington, D.C.
 The predator has become a person again.
Nick Saba curled his stick around the puck and carved through the Bishop Connolly High defenders, reaching deep into their zone before being forced behind their net.
 The Coyle-Cassidy forward had already scored, and was having another great game - even though he had snorted OxyContin before suiting up.
 He stopped, scanned the front of the net, then flipped the puck to a teammate who slapped it home.
 Final score: Coyle 6, Connolly 1.
 Another win for Coyle. Another step for Nick Saba on his road to
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what surely would be a college hockey, or even pro, career.
 No one knew, however, that the sophomore sensation had long left that path, having been lured by a new love - a drug that would soon replace hockey, and everything else.
 OxyContin. OC. The new, near-pure narcotic intended for chronic pain - it's what drove him now.
  He was good at hockey - he was better at sneaking OC. In bathrooms, his bedroom, locker rooms, before games, afterward - whenever the drug called. Whenever he could muster the money.
 He'd crush the pill, snort it and fade into his opiate high, never realizing how low it would take him.
 "I think back and I can't believe what I saw and what I did," said Saba. "I've seen Hell."
The final descent began four years ago - with one pill.
 Having just attended a Coyle dance early in his sophomore year, Nick and his group gathered at a friend's house.
 It wasn't long before the first OC was offered - 20 milligram pills were being passed around. For free.
 Nick swallowed one without hesitating.
 "I had done Percocets," he said, "but this was like Percocets times 10. I loved it. I didn't even drink the whole night."
 Even though Nick's family lived on the West Side of Brockton, and his older brother had gone to Brockton High, his parents had seen drugs infiltrate the lives of several friends, so they decided to send Nick to Coyle.
 The move only increased what was, at the time, a false sense of security.
 OC had become widely available, and most kids knew nothing of its addictive properties.
  "I had absolutely no idea what I was taking," he said. "There was
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no warning from anybody. Why not do them? ... Next thing you know, it was like everybody was doing them, everywhere I turned."
 The next several months, he followed a route all too familiar to youths in this region - he would need more and stronger OC, each day, but didn't have the money.
  So he began stealing from his family, friends, parents, schoolmates, other users, dealers - and the light that was Nick Saba began to dim.
 His parents, Bill and June, thought he was ill, but never suspected the sickness of addiction.
 For several weeks, in a blur of tests and doctor visits, the Sabas searched for what was robbing their son of his talent, energy - and his smile.
 One doctor diagnosed depression. Another thought he was bipolar - all prescribed varying degrees of medication.
 One locked him up in the hospital's psychiatric ward.
  "Nobody said it was drugs to us," said his mother, a school administrator. "By the time we found out, he had a full-blown OxyContin habit."
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 They put him into rehab, but it was too late.
 "There was no way we were getting him back," said his mother. "At that point, we had lost him for the next 2½ years."
Life deteriorated fast for the entire family. Nick stole from his mother's purse, his father's wallet, his brother's bureau.
 He hawked his father's tools, three of his younger brother's video game systems, the family TV, even the coffee machine - he took everything he could sell at the pawn shop in Brockton.
  His father built chests, inside which he would lock video games, radios, CDs - everything that fit.
  Soon, Nick left home, left school, and then, like many, graduated to the much cheaper heroin - injecting it one day at a rooming house in Brockton.
  "My life was so screwed up, when they offered it, I'm like, 'Go ahead, give me that,' and someone shot me up," he said. "It took me right back to my first Oxy - that same super feeling. ... I loved it. I fell in love with the needle. It gave me the legs I needed to run with for another year and a half."
 He ran into a life of darkness and depravity.
 Nick Saba, once everyone's friend, became a public enemy - mugging dealers and users, cheating anybody he could, lying to everybody.
 He soon disappeared into a life of predation, injecting heroin four times a day.
 "I became a completely different person," he said. "Everybody around me saw what was happening to me. I weighed 120 pounds. I was pale, ghost white. I looked just completely nasty."
 Life for the Saba family became a daily brush with death.
Friends stopped calling, or having their children play at the Sabas'
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home in Brockton.
 Colleges stopped calling Nick. Colleagues stopped calling his parents.
 And the police started - mostly because of Nick, the troublemaker, who had been arrested several times on drug, weapon and theft charges.
 "People judge you," said June Saba. "The general public judges you. There is a sense of shame. We would say, 'What did we do to raise a heroin addict? Where did we go wrong? Are we bad parents?'"
 Nick - sometimes at home, sometimes in parking lots - would overdose several times and require emergency help to save his life.
 Soon, even taking larger doses, he began growing immune to the drug's effects, and instead of a daylong high, he would suffer painful lows.
 "I thought about killing myself many, many times," he said. "I wanted to grab a rope and end it. I thought about OD'ing on purpose, and came close a few times."
 But he stayed in touch with his parents, and as the months went on, began to disclose what he, and many of his friends, were enduring.
 One night, in 2004, he sat with his family and wrote down the names of everyone they knew - or suspected - was involved with OxyContin or heroin.
 They came up with 80.
 Desperate, the family moved to Bridgewater. Over the next 18 months, the family began to heal - thanks in large part to Nick, who had begun entering rehab programs.
 He had led his family into the pit of addiction - but he would also help carry them out.
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He began his journey back the night he was shot.
 This time, he was the target of another armed addict, who intended to rob him in Brockton.
 Nick tried to grab the .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, but his attacker fired - Nick fell to the ground as the man fled.
 "It went 'POW,' and it was the loudest noise I ever heard," he said. "I jumped to the ground. I said, 'I'm hit. I'm shot.'"
 The bullet had grazed his side, leaving a hole in two shirts.
 But the brush with mortality awakened Nick, who had failed at most of his rehab attempts.
 The boy who had once courted death decided he wanted to live.
 It would be just a few more months of running the streets before he would be reborn - inside a jail cell.
 Failing a drug test while on probation, Nick was sent to the Plymouth County House of Correction in summer 2005. It would be his sixth time in jail, but the last time he would use drugs.
 He walked out Aug. 31, 2005, into a life of helping others. First, it
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was his family.
 Then, it was anybody he could.
Nick didn't move home. His parents had different plans for him - he would live in a small Middleboro house just off Route 28 that his father had converted into a sober house.
 Bill Saba put his son in charge.
 Growing stronger each day off drugs, Nick thrived doing what he had always done best - lead and motivate others.
 Soon, addicts from throughout the region - both active and recovering - began calling the person who beat heroin.
 "I talk to Nick every day," said Brockton's Pat Stack, 19, a recovering user who moved into the home. "I had nothing. He got me a job, got me to meetings. He just kept grabbing me and taking me to meetings. ... I'll be calling him the rest of my life."
 The simple ranch-style home - with its bare walls, sparse decoration and big screen TV - is usually at capacity.
 There are no parties, no girls - just curfews, calmness, and the occasional poker game.
 Nick leads his housemates through nightly counseling sessions,
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periodic drug testing, and along with his father takes them to boxing matches, stage productions, baseball and hockey games.
 A year ago, Nick was flown to Washington to share his story of addiction and redemption with a congressional panel studying the problem.
 "Unbelievable - me speaking in Washington," he said. "I trashed D.A.R.E., and everybody cracked up."
 He smokes now, lives on Red Bull and Burger King food, and is training to become a barber.
 The former sports star has also found his way back into athletics, coaching a softball team of recovering addicts.
 "I try to help somebody every day, if I can," said Nick, "and I try not to expect a thank you. I'm doing it for me, not for them. After all, that's what people do in life. We help each other."

 Steve Damish can be reached at sdamish@enterprisenews.com.