This was the Thanksgiving that Austen Everett was supposed to miss because she died. This was the day when her loved ones and University of Miami teammates would be giving tearful thanks for at least having her as long as they did, and clinging to the memory of her laughter and smile.

There are thanks we give perfunctorily on a day like this, a parade of words by rote. Then there are thanks we give that emanate from where heart and soul intersect. From deep in the bones.

Most of us can be thankful today that we rather routinely say how thankful we are to be alive when never having had to actually confront the alternative.

''I kind of lucked out,'' Everett, a goalkeeper on the UM soccer team, says with a smile. ``Words can't even express how blessed I am just to be here and having Thanksgiving.''

Her once-long blond hair is trimmed close in a buzz-cut. It isn't a fashion statement. It is a statement more profound. It says she is alive. That she survived.

''Kind of like a trophy,'' she says of the hair not there.

The date August 8 is tattooed small inside her left wrist. It happened to be the day the Beijing Olympics began and it happened to be the day the chemotherapy ended -- the treatment that erased the cancer found in her abdomen, chest and neck.

''A little reminder,'' she calls the tattoo.

It would be easy, here in the Sports pages, to consider all we have to be grateful for in South Florida this Thanksgiving Day and perhaps start with the Dolphins' turnaround. Except that chances are it isn't what you or I think of in our quietest moments of reflection, no matter how deep our fandom runs.

Once in a while our thanks run deeper than sports, and it is true for our athletes, too. Even for them, there are games, and there is real life. Even for them, there are seasons, and there is one day to let the thanks speak.

Everett recalls how crazy it was that she lucked into finding out something was very wrong with her, and how it was almost too late.

She had been having increasing back pain for a month or so but ignored it.

''I'm pretty stubborn with going to the doctor and stuff,'' she said. ``I feel like such a wimp.''

LARGE MASS

Then her boyfriend at the time, UM basketball player Cyrus McGowan, broke his thumb on the rim and went to the hospital, where Austen visited him in the emergency room. This was in the spring.

Her back hurt so terribly that day at the hospital that her boyfriend insisted she have it looked into as long as she was there.

A scan indicated a large mass near her abdomen. Doctors removed a tumor described as the size of a ``small football.''

Yet a biopsy was inconclusive. Two weeks in the hospital and they couldn't figure what it was. Finally, on Memorial Day weekend in late May, they did.

She had stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the worst type, meaning it had spread outside the lymph system.

`A SECOND SHOT'

They told her she might have lived only another four months if it hadn't been detected, indirectly, because her boyfriend had happened to break his thumb.

Chemotherapy ensued that week. Frequent checkups since have found her cancer-free and looking forward to her senior soccer season with the Hurricanes.

''A few months ago I was so sick I couldn't walk, and now I walk out onto the field for The U,'' she said. ``How blessed I feel to kind of have a second shot.''

The mundane -- like classes in communications, political science and geology -- takes on a vibrancy.

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