TEAMMATES JUST WANTED TO PAY HOMAGE TO HIS SPIRIT; JERSEY WAS ONE ONLY A MOTHER COULD LOVE.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

By now, whoever stole jersey No. 18 off the wall at the Iceoplex hockey rink last week has got to know it isn't worth anything on the open market.

No fences of stolen goods or sports memorabilia collectors will pay a dime for the name value. It never belonged to a famous hockey star or any of the L.A. Kings who often use the North Hills ice rink to practice during the season. Wayne Gretzky never wore it when he was in town.

No, the jersey has no real market value - unless you're one of the women who knew the man who did wear it. Unless you're his mother or one of his three sisters.

To them, jersey No. 18 is the most valuable piece of hockey clothing ever manufactured, and they want it back. Need it back.

It belonged to a son and brother named Evan Ginsburg who came to the sport of ice hockey late - in his early 30s - came to it with an energy and passion that drew people to him like a magnet.

Came to it only a few years before he was to lose his battle with malignant melanoma, and leave this world at age 36.

Leave it with a lot of friends and teammates wanting to pay homage to his spirit and memory by hanging his picture and jersey on a wall in the hockey rink where he had some of his best moments as a player for the Lightning, an amateur hockey team.

Someone stole that memory from a wall last week, probably thinking it was worth something, maybe a collector's item.

It was. But only to Evan Ginsburg's family.

You can find Elaine Maynard at least two days a week sitting on a folding chair in Mount Eden Cemetery in Granada Hills, talking to her son, Evan.

Telling him how his sisters are doing and how much she still misses him. She'll bring fresh flowers, of course, and a lollipop because no matter what age a son or daughter is when they die, they're still babies to the parents who outlive them.

On this day, Elaine is trying to explain to her son the shock she felt when she found his jersey gone when she stopped by the Iceoplex the day after Thanksgiving to do what she always does when she visits him there - tape a single red rose onto his picture frame.

How she felt violated and so empty inside looking up at an empty wall where No. 18 used to be.

As near as anyone at the ice rink could tell, someone had stolen it and a video camera from the office the night before. Why, they couldn't say.

There were other framed jerseys on the walls, jerseys worn by professional hockey players - jerseys worth something on the open market.

But Evan's was the only one taken, and what they were to make of that, no one knew.

One of his sisters, Tobi Simmons, was incensed when she found out, but there was nothing anyone could do. The people at the rink were trying to be nice, offering to put another of Evan's jersey's back up on the wall if the family had one, Elaine told her son.

But they didn't, did they? The people at the ice rink couldn't know the only other hockey jersey Evan ever wore was right with him now, inside this coffin.

So, all they could do, she told her son, was hope and pray that whoever took it realized it wasn't the jersey of a famous athlete - a jersey worth something to people who buy and collect these kinds of things.

Realize it was the jersey of an amateur player who came to the game late, and died too young.

A man with a good, kind heart who touched the lives of a lot of people while he lived - touched them so deeply they wanted to honor his memory by hanging his jersey - No. 18 - up on the wall with the stars of the sport.

Elaine Maynard walks through the Northridge Fashion Center on Wednesday morning, mingling with strangers, trying to find the elusive holiday spirit.

This is where she comes for therapy, she says - for the time she knows she needs to stop thinking so much about the past, and start concentrating on the future.

She watches young mothers with little children and babies in their arms approach Santa Claus, and she sees herself 35 years ago with a little toddler by her side - a little boy scared of the man in the long white beard.

She asks - no, begs - that the person who stole her son's memory off the wall of a hockey rink last week please return it to the rink, no questions asked.

``It means so much to us, and nothing to them,'' she says, trying to fight back tears in a mall where therapy isn't working.

Ten minutes later, Elaine Maynard is buying a single red rose and a lollipop, on her way to the only place she finds peace anymore - sitting in a cemetery, talking to her son.

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PHOTO Evan Ginsburg, who came to ice hockey late in life, wore jersey No. 18, which is now missing.