Remember them as men, not as a death toll. Cláudio Milar was thirty-four, a Uruguayan from the border town of Chuy who had become one of the greatest players in the club's history, scoring more than a hundred goals in its colors. Régis Gouveia was twenty-eight, in the prime of his career. Giovani Guimarães was forty, the goalkeeping coach, a son of Pelotas himself. They had families, hometowns, futures interrupted. Years later, the depth of that loss would echo forward in a small grace: in 2025, Cláudio Milar's son, Agustín, was named to the Brasil de Pelotas senior squad for the first time, carrying his father's name back onto the field his father had ruled.

The Federal Highway Police later reconstructed what happened, and the numbers are hard to absorb. The bus plunged some forty meters, a drop equivalent to a fifteen-story building, and overturned at least four times before it stopped. That anyone survived at all is its own kind of miracle. Of the thirty-one aboard, twenty-eight were injured, some gravely. Warning signs may have been there: the defender Alex Martins, seated beside Régis, said the driver had drifted off the road more than once even on the way to the match. In 2014, the driver, Wendel Vergara, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years and two months; as a first-time offender he was released on bail and ordered to perform community service.

Survival was not the end of the suffering. The player Odair, who would later become a respected coach, sustained severe spinal trauma and was forced to retire within months. Danrlei, the club's marquee signing for that season, told ESPN in 2023 that he has never boarded a bus again since that night. The squad's emotional state, as the player Eliandro later described it, was shattered, and the dread of every subsequent road trip became its own slow torment. When the season resumed, the grief traveled with them. They could not outrun what they had seen on the road to Canguçu, and the toll showed in everything that followed.

The football world closed around the wounded club. Coach Claudio Duarte offered to train the team for free. The state federation pushed back Brasil de Pelotas's championship debut by sixteen days so the squad could regroup and rebuild. Even so, the season was a struggle, and the club was relegated. Yet the story did not end in defeat. Brasil de Pelotas steadied itself, finishing ninth in the national second division that same year, and climbed back to the top tier of state football by winning the Campeonato Gaúcho's access division in 2013. The bus that left the road near Canguçu took three lives and scarred dozens more. The club that mourned them kept playing, in their memory.