Looking back, it seems almost surreal to her, a chance meeting last summer with a friendly stranger who—in just the few minutes that their lives crossed—made a lasting impression.

Maggie Farley and her husband, Dave, were at her family’s cottage on the lake in Wilson. Maggie is 26, a recent college graduate. Dave is an engineering major at UB. They were hanging out with friends, cheering on two guys who were diving into the water on a cool night. The guys dried off and stopped over to chat.

One of the young men—she remembers him as friendly, with a “cool vibe”— had an incredible story. Years earlier, he had been in an accident on his all-terrain vehicle. In the hospital emergency room, he said he died a couple of times, only to be brought back to life. He eventually came out of a coma and recovered.

Maggie Farley told me by phone recently that there was something else that stayed with her.

“He kept saying, ‘I was given a second chance, and I feel like I am supposed to do something with it.’. . . He felt like he was not supposed to still be here.”

The guy and his friend stayed only a half-hour. But the visit stuck in Maggie’s mind.

“I mean, he wasn’t pushing religion or anything,” she said. “He was just saying, ‘I feel like I was given a second chance for a reason. But I do not know what it is right now.’ ”

That was, she thought, the last of it. Until she picked up the newspaper on a recent morning. There was a story about a horrible trailer-home fire in Newfane. The blaze started early the morning of April 24. Tera Martin, her 3-year-old daughter Haley Hadsell and her 10-year-old nephew, Rick Wade, survived the catastrophe.

Two people perished: Tera Martin’s 7- year-old son, Mark Hadsell III. And her 28-year-old brother, Ken Martin.

Family members say that Ken Martin died a hero. Niagara County Fire Coordinator John Cecula told me: “We believe that Kenny . . . went back to where the two boys were and tried to get them out. He picked [Rick] up and got him out the window. We hear that he went back to get [Mark] and was himself overcome.”

Maggie Farley nearly dropped the newspaper. Kenneth Martin, the tragic hero of the Newfane fire, was the man she met that summer night.

“I was shocked,” she told me. “I remembered his name and what he said to us. It’s a horrible story, what happened. But what he did, saving [the boy], it just seemed incredible, the connection with what he said to us that night.

“What I got from the story [of the fire],” she said, “is that maybe this is why he was given that second chance.”

I do not know what Ken Martin had in mind when he said he was spared for a higher purpose. I am sure that everyone wishes that his heroics would not have come at so high a price. But whether Ken Martin was right about being saved for a reason, the fact remains: He survived that accident years ago. Because he did, he was in Newfane the night of the fire. Had he not been there, his 10-year-old nephew might not be alive today.

To be clear, Kenny Martin was no saint. People tell me he was a likable screw-up whose frequent brushes with the law, usually involving alcohol, began as a teenager. Indeed, he was being pursued by cops for reckless riding the night he crashed his ATV.

“I liked Kenny, he was never evil-minded,” said attorney Walt Moxham, a family friend. “He just made some dumb-ass decisions that got him into trouble . . . But he always wanted to help out. What he did that night [of the fire] did not surprise me at all.”

Ken Martin was spared from death for a reason. That is what he told Maggie Farley, on that cool summer night by the lake.