Training camp had just begun this winter, and Alhaji Kamara was poised for a big year.
In 2015, at age 21, he had posted a half-dozen goals during IFK Norrkoping’s first Swedish championship in 23 years, raising his two-season total to 16. Last fall, he scored for Sierra Leone’s national team in a World Cup qualifier.
The muscle-packed striker, from the hard-luck shadows of Freetown’s international airport, was on the rise.
And then in February, as Norrkoping was preparing for a campaign that would include its first appearance in Europe’s premier continental competition since 1963, medical test results arrived: Kamara was told he had a congenital heart defect.