Johnny and Matty Gaudreau were more than hockey. They were inspirations to their South Jersey community.

In the parking lot outside Hollydell Ice Arena in Sewell, a long rectangle of black so quiet Friday morning that it seemed a solemn, sacred place, eight young hockey players mingled in a loose circle, their voices nothing more than whispers and mumbles.

They were 18, 19, maybe 20 years old, all players on the Philadelphia Rebels junior team, their haircuts fluffy mops, their faces stone. Johnny Gaudreau had been an NHL superstar — a Hobey Baker Award winner at Boston College, a seven-time All-Star over his decade in the league with the Calgary Flames and Columbus Blue Jackets, on his way to becoming the greatest hockey player to come out of the Philadelphia area. He had been their hero. Matty Gaudreau had played in the American Hockey League and had returned to spend the last four years working and coaching in Hollydell Ice Arena. He had been their coach. The players had just left a team meeting. Now they stood in the lot and stared at their feet.

Those two men were gone now, Johnny at 31 and Matty at 29 — they were always Johnny and Matty to their family and friends and everyone else — both of them killed Thursday night as they were riding bicycles along County Road 551, not far from the Salem County home where they grew up. The details and timing of the incident are so terrible and tragic that they can barely be believed, the sadness and sheer anger mixing into an emotion without a name. The driver who struck Johnny and Matty, according to New Jersey State Police, said he had drunk five or six beers before climbing behind the wheel of his Jeep Grand Cherokee. Johnny’s wife, Meredith, had given birth to the couple’s second child, Johnny, just a few months ago. Matty’s wife, Madeline, is pregnant.

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The brothers were together and in town for their sister Katie’s wedding, which was scheduled for 1:45 p.m. Friday at St. Mary’s Church in Gloucester City, just two blocks from Gloucester Catholic High School. There, Johnny and Matty, and their father, Guy, had begun transforming South Jersey into something it had never been before, into a hockey hotbed.

“They were legends at this rink,” Ryan Bunting, one of the players, said, “the whole family.”

It was Guy who had helped start the hockey program at Gloucester Catholic some two decades ago, who became the head coach at Gloucester Catholic and in the region’s junior ranks. It was Johnny who scored 51 goals over his final two seasons at Gloucester Catholic, leading the team to the 2010 New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association Championship. Who led Boston College to a national championship as a freshman in 2012. Who at 5-foot-9 and 165 pounds had shown that a player didn’t have to be big to dream big.

“Just an inspiration,” Tom Bunting, the hockey director at Hollydell and Ryan’s father, said in his office Friday, his face wet with tears, “being the first guys who made it out of here, who not just made it to the NHL but had the amount of success that Johnny’s had. As a coach, as a parent, you could tell your players or your kid, ‘Hey, anything’s possible.’”

Johnny and Matty weren’t just symbols of that promise, though. They backed it up. Eight years ago, they and Guy established an annual golf tournament to support Gloucester Catholic, and the event had raised more than $300,000, all of it poured into the school’s financial aid budget to make it more affordable for kids to go there.

The most recent tournament was just last month, at Blue Heron Pines Golf Club in Egg Harbor City, and there was Johnny, shaking hands and catching up with old friends. John Colman, who was Gloucester Catholic’s principal when the school created its hockey program more than two decades ago, was at the tournament, too, and over the phone Friday morning, from his home in North Carolina, he could barely get the words out through his grief.

“Words can’t express it,” he said. “It’s going to take years — maybe never — to put this behind the people who know the Gaudreau family and Gloucester Catholic and the whole South Jersey and Philadelphia community.”

Gloucester Catholic, a modest red-brick building that blends into the tightly packed neighborhoods and capillary streets around it, was closed and silent Friday morning. Two blocks away, at 10 a.m., bells rang at St. Mary’s Church, heralding a wedding ceremony that had been scheduled to commence in less than four hours.

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Across the street, in the house she has lived in all her life, Ann Gorman, 59, sat on her porch, as still as everything around her. Five generations of her family had gone to Gloucester Catholic. “Everybody knows each other, right?” she said. “I started getting texts about it last night. It’s just devastating. They put Gloucester Catholic ice hockey on the map. The school didn’t have a team until they got there and did it. They’re just the most down-to-earth, nicest family — hard-working, would do anything to help anybody. You don’t expect that to happen.”

Minutes later, inside a darkened pub at Hollydell Ice Arena, Johnny Gaudreau’s No. 13 sweater with the Calgary Flames and Matty Gaudreau’s No. 40 sweater with the Bridgeport Islanders, both framed and behind glass, hung above the doorway to Tom Bunting’s office. A few people lingered in the restaurant, but no one spoke or turned on the lights. Just outside the arena’s front doors, a man knelt down, blessed himself, and prayed.