Devon Marie Lam enjoyed listening to Alicia Keys, and watching Wiggles videos. She loved Legos and her tea sets and throwing balls at her dad. She had favorite books read to her each night: The Very Hungry Caterpillar . . . The Very Busy Spider . . . The Rainbow Fish.

Devon could beat her mom at Dora Candy Land, "fair and square," as her father put it. She had a crib but never slept in it. That was for her stuffed animals.

Her grandma bought her a trampoline, but she preferred to use it as a hammock.

At her Mah Mah's house, she would play marbles on her high chair and throw balls at the stairs.

Devon liked to laugh with her friends. She had best friends - her big sisters, she called them. They played lacrosse, for Temple University.

When 5-year-old Devon first came to North Broad Street and met the Temple women's lacrosse team early in 2008, she sat on a table with her head down, avoiding eye contact.

Her father, also meeting the team, explained Devon's medical history. The brain hemorrhage that led to the discovery and removal of a tumor. The chemotherapy and stem-cell rescue and six weeks of radiation. Through the hospital stays, the injections and MRIs, the medical and homeopathic remedies - and then the return of the tumor.

All that medical talk . . . who could blame Devon for keeping her head down.

"Just looking at her life up until that point, anyone who was a stranger was a doctor or somebody examining her," Danny Lam said. "She was probably very, very frightened."

Temple's team had been matched with Devon as part of Friends of Jaclyn, a new program in which college sports teams adopt children with brain tumors. The program's founder, Denis Murphy, had started it after his own daughter, Jaclyn, was adopted by Northwestern's NCAA champion women's lacrosse team. That relationship continues.

After Temple players met Devon and gave her a miniature lacrosse stick, the group walked over to watch a gymnastics meet in the same building, McGonigle Hall. A Temple player offered Devon her hand.

"She didn't say anything, but she was eager to hold my hand and walk down the hall," Nicholle St. Pierre recalled.

Her parents were touched by the sight.

"She had a lot of deficits, serious balance issues," her father said. "She had to relearn how to walk; she also lost hearing in her left ear, lost high frequency in her right ear. She had to relearn how to eat, how to swallow, how to talk. Her fine motor skills needed serious work. She was coming along pretty well."

"She saw we weren't going to poke her with needles or do any scans," said Brittney Hoffman, another Temple player who already had made a connection, leaving a slew of messages on Devon's Caring Bridge Web page before that first meeting.

The lacrosse stick was new to her.

"She didn't really get it - she held it completely horizontal, kind of really dainty, really loosely," Hoffman said.

Until that day, through all her medical travails, "Devon never, ever threw a temper tantrum," her father said.

Until that day, when it was time to go.