DETROIT -- Rick Moses still remembers the first time he and his good friend Brian Bluhm went to a Tigers game together. It was a Cub Scout trip to Tiger Stadium for a game in which Frank Tanana was pitching. They couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old, as he remembers.

They were neighbors then, living around the corner from each other in the Detroit-area suburb of Troy, but the Bluhms moved to Louisville, Ky., soon after that. Moses and Bluhm remained long-distance friends through high school, but they fell out of touch in college. In what almost seems like fate now, they got back in touch earlier this year, finding each other online. It didn't take long for them to find a common topic.

"I knew he was still a Tigers fan," Moses said in a phone interview Tuesday evening, "but I didn't realize until I reconnected with him how big of a Tigers fan he was."

Bluhm, 25, was among the 32 people killed Monday by a gunman at Virginia Tech.

Bluhm was a graduate student in civil engineering and was less than two months shy of his Master's degree. He was working as a teaching assistant while wrapping up his thesis, the culmination of years of classwork and research, and readying for a career in water resources. He was on the second floor of Norris Hall when a gunman barged in and began firing.

Now, as Moses tries to make sense of the tragedy, he has been learning about all the people with whom Bluhm shared his passion for the Tigers. It's helping him deal with his grief.

Moses was one of the few people in Michigan who had met Bluhm and kept in touch with him. Yet Bluhm, very active on the internet, had many more friends in Michigan who had never seen him in person.

"It's mind-blowing," Moses said, "how many people who never met him, yet were touched by him. He had a profound impact on everybody he touched without meeting him."

Curtis Granderson, in a small way, was one of them. Like Bluhm, Granderson is very present online. Bluhm first got in touch with Granderson on the Tigers center fielder's MySpace page, and he later sent e-mails through Granderson's public relations representative, John Fuller. Granderson was Bluhm's favorite player.

"I had yet to meet him," Granderson said on Tuesday night, "but through the world of MySpace, you can get a little bit of a friendship based on there. Right now, he's in my top friends on my MySpace page, and I've already got a couple comments from some of his friends who knew him and were also affected by the story and just wanted to contact me, as well. It's amazing how big that network can be."

At this point, the network is all over the Internet. Some knew him by his online identities -- estrepe1 or VTTigers -- while others knew him by his e-mail address and still others knew him by name.

On some sites, it was difficult to find someone who didn't know of Bluhm, who was a daily poster on the Tigers message board at motownsports.com, to the rate of more than 30,000 posts -- most by any member there.

Joshua Allerding knew Bluhm from message boards dating back seven years.

"For the life of me, I can't ever remember reading a cross word about him or uttered by him from then till now," Allerding wrote in an e-mail. "His passion for and knowledge of Tiger baseball and his university was only eclipsed by a persistent respect and decency that he showed everyone he interacted with -- not necessarily a common occurrence on a medium like a sports message board."

Another message board member, Lee Panas, remembered Bluhm on his Tiger Tales blog.

"Everybody who knew Brian liked him as a person and appreciated his knowledge of the game and of the Tigers," Panas wrote. "When you talked to Brian, you did not talk to an anonymous fan on a message board. You talked to a very intelligent, cordial and thoughtful gentleman. He was straightforward and honest and always interested in what you had to say. He was a real person and a real friend to all of us, and our community will not be the same without him."

News of Bluhm's death began circulating online late Monday night. By Tuesday evening, motownsports.com was almost impossible to reach because of the volume of traffic, most of it directed to a thread in his memory.

As disturbing an intrusion as the shootings were in an academic environment, they were jarring to an online community and a sport that can provide an escape from the cruelty of the real world.

"When I heard the news, I was absolutely stunned," wrote Eddie Bajek, who also knew Bluhm online. "It was something we feared all day, and when we got official notification, it was an absolute shock. He was a great guy who cared for others and showed an absolute devotion to the Detroit Tigers, as I have."

Bajek contacted Fuller, who in turn notified Granderson. By then, Granderson's site was also receiving the news. Granderson hopes to reach out to Bluhm's family, but he wants to wait at least a couple of days to let family members grieve and deal with their pressing matters.

"The whole incident in general hits home," Granderson said. "I went to school, and a lot of stories they were saying [on television] were very similar. Could've happened at my school [Illinois-Chicago]. Just putting myself in that situation, being in the classroom like some of those students were, it's definitely a tough thing to fathom. It was a rough day, a tough day, and it's going to leave its mark on society in general."

It left its mark at Comerica Park, where the Tigers were already scheduled to observe a moment of silence before the game for the victims as part of an observance around Major League Baseball. When the club learned of Bluhm's story, it included him in the proceeding. Public address announcer Bobb Vergiels mentioned Bluhm by name as a lifelong Tigers fan.

That's how many Tigers fans from around the world will remember him, too.

"I can't speak for anyone else," Allerding continued, "but it's hard to imagine how anyone could read this thread and not think that an individual like Brian Bluhm didn't bring an awful lot of people together."