The Millar boys of Westminster were forbidden from getting tattoos while “on the family payroll.”

“Unless something extraordinarily meaningful happens,” mom Debbie elaborated. “The Olympic rings were my example.”

Everyone is inked now with personal representations of what happened on and after April 16, 2018. A healthy college hockey hopeful, middle brother Adam went into heart failure.

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The second and third Millar brothers, defensemen two years apart, came up through the Rocky Mountain Roughriders organization. They each shot past 6-foot-4, the recipients of rogue height genes in an otherwise normally sized family.

Adam said he and Colorado College-bound Jack were together “nearly 24/7,” refereeing and working toward junior and professional hockey.

In January 2018, Adam guessed he had a common cold. A few months later, perhaps it was pneumonia or bronchitis. Throughout, he suspected he just was out of shape or not good enough.

He was 18, a North American Prospects Hockey League 18U first-team all-star along with Jack. They had no family history of serious heart conditions. There was no reason to think anything was wrong.

He downplayed the extent of his symptoms throughout, Debbie said. He didn’t share that he could barely finish a workout and was vomiting after every skate. She heard Adam coughing through the night while lying down, which they later learned was a sign of heart failure.

She took him to Urgent Care. A nurse asked to do an electrocardiogram, then came back into the room and said she’d called 911.

“We were both like, ‘Why?’” Debbie said.

His heart was beating too quickly and unable to get blood to the rest of his body. At the first of three hospitals, medical staff tried to get his heart back into normal, “sinus” rhythm. They succeeded, but Adam didn’t wake up. His liver and kidneys had started to shut down.

“I loaded him on Flight for Life, and I didn’t think I’d ever see him again,” father Jay Millar said.

At St. Anthony’s Central Hospital in Lakewood, Dr. Nima Aghili implanted an Impella CP pump into the left side of his heart — a small motorlike device, Debbie said, that relieves some of the stress on the organ. Adam was one of the rare patients that needed another device in his right side.

Flight for Life transported Adam to another hospital in case he needed a heart transplant. His condition improved, and the devices were removed.

The last conversation Adam remembered was Jack making a joke about unplugging life support to charge Adam’s phone. While being weaned off, Adam dreamed Jack was jumping on top of him. That turned out to be the doctor giving him CPR while he was in cardiac arrest for 79 seconds.

“Twelve hours later, I was officially off the ventilator and just thoroughly enjoying an applesauce,” Adam said.

He’d lost 40 pounds and couldn’t stand without assistance.

“Sixteen days after being discharged from the hospital, I was skating with Jack on my 19th birthday,” he said.

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Adam played a full 2018-19 “rehab” season. He started where he knew he would play consistently, the National Collegiate Development Conference, and worked all the way back to the North American Hockey League — the same league he’d tried out for while feeling terrible.

“I’m back,” Adam thought. “That was a milestone.”

He was three days from moving to Cloquet to play for the Minnesota Wilderness. During a cardio workout, Adam’s Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator shocked him.

“I thought he just tripped and ate it,” Jack said. “He woke up five, 10 seconds later.”

Adam had minor surgery and started taking medicine that affected his training. In the weeks between collapsing and surgery, he had to “digest” giving up his hockey career.

He’d visited Abiomed, the company that made the Impella CP and RP devices that stabilized his heart. He reached out asking for good engineering schools. They offered him an internship instead.

“I was always good at math and science, but I didn’t know how to apply it to something I was passionate about,” he said.

“That company and that device gave me a second chance at life.”

He’s barreling through the mechanical engineering curriculum at Northeastern with a May 2023 target graduation. He’s ready to testify about the Impella device on Capitol Hill one day if needed.

“It was a new Adam,” Debbie said. “He woke up with kind of a new appreciation for life. I think he fully realized how close to dying he actually was.

“He was just like, ‘You know what, this absolutely sucks, but I can sit here and wallow in it or I can figure out something else.’”

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Meanwhile, Jack was alone on the brothers’ old path.

“That was really hard. We’d always trained together and skated together,” Jack said.

He wrote “Do it for Adam” in big letters on his bathroom mirror. It’s still there.

“He’s probably one of my biggest fans,” Jack said.

Jack is a rising sophomore at Colorado College and poised for major minutes as the Tigers debut a new arena under a new coach.

Adam watched nearly every game of Jack’s first season at CC. It was chopped by COVID-19 shutdowns and league adjustments, but the 20-year-old appeared in all 23 games and led the Tigers defensemen in scoring (2 goals, 4 assists).

The Tigers are set to play at Northeastern on Oct. 23.

“I probably get more excited than I should,” Adam said. “It’s a relationship where he knows I still know a lot about the game. It’s a very open dialogue.

“We both know how long we did it together and it’s something we still hold very close.”

While Adam was on life support, Debbie told Jack to keep skating and training.

“’He’s like, ‘I can’t get on the ice if Adam’s not there. I don’t know how,’” she recalled.

She told him his brother would want him to keep going.

Jack’s tattoo is an arrow on his bicep, a reminder to move forward. Even the Olympic rings aren’t that extraordinarily meaningful.

“We’re so blessed and we’re so fortunate because it could have turned the other way so easily,” Jay said.

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