And then there was her personal approach to preparing first-time marathoners to toe the starting line. Over the years she took thousands of runners on countless miles of training runs leading up to Boston Marathon day.

“It’s fun,” she said in an interview posted on YouTube. “I mean, this is what I live for. I want to see people succeed. This is life-changing for them to be able to run a marathon and be inspired by a charity and earn their spot at the starting line that way. For them, it’s the Super Bowl of running.”

Ms. Hurley, who helped raise her final millions while running her last two Boston Marathons after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer, died Nov. 1. She was 62 and lived in North Andover.

“I always love to be known as Boston’s biggest cheerleader,” Ms. Hurley, a cheerleader in high school and later for the New England Patriots, said in the 2020 YouTube interview with Thom Gilligan, founder and chief executive of Marathon Tours & Travel.

Trading football field sidelines for road racecourses, she cheered on year after year of runners, even while running in the marathons herself.

“In addition to being everyone’s cheerleader, she was everyone’s mom. She really cared about all her runners,” said Sarah Wessmann, team captain and a member of each year’s marathon contingent for Last Call Foundation. The charity, inspired by the heroic life and line-of-duty death in 2014 of her then-fiancé, Boston firefighter Michael Kennedy, funds education and research to advance firefighter safety.

Near the end of each Boston Marathon, Ms. Hurley’s son Ryan McGillivray recalled, she could be spotted with her arm around the waist of another runner — helping a member of her charity team or even a stranger whose strength was fading.

From the beginning of marathon preparations, Ms. Hurley stressed that all runners should have “their Boylston Street moment, hearing the crowd roar and seeing the finish line in the distance, and the happiness that brings,” said Ryan, who lives in Wrentham and is vice president of operations for DMSE Sports, the event management firm founded by his father, Dave McGillivray.

During weeks of training runs, Ms. Hurley helped newcomers prepare for the vagaries of the potentially punishing weather, and for the constancy of Heartbreak Hill.

In February she would hold the fund-raising “Superhero 17” – a 17-mile run along the marathon course in which participants ran dressed as superheroes, their merriment a distraction from the arduous training workout.

And Ms. Hurley “didn’t just run the marathon. She had you learn about the course and the history and why things matter,” said Wessmann, who was among the runners Ms. Hurley helped train.

Ms. Hurley made sure runners knew about legendary Olympian Johnny Kelley, who completed the Boston Marathon nearly 60 times. She led training runs to Kelley’s statue in Newton so everyone could pay their respects.

“It’s a cliché,” Wessmann said, “but she really did put the fun in fund-raising.”

The third of four sisters, Susan Ann Hurley was born on April 8, 1963, and grew up in North Reading.

Her mother, Sylvia Bidmead Hurley, was a real estate title examiner, and her father, James Hurley, was assistant register at Middlesex Family and Probate Court.

A cheerleading squad champion at North Reading High School, Ms. Hurley became a runner early on.

“I started running when I used to miss the bus in high school and I haven’t stopped,” she told Boston Magazine just before the 2013 marathon. “I’m proud to say I am a person who has worked out her whole life and never stopped and rarely missed a day.”

Ms. Hurley, who attended Emerson College, formerly was married to Dave McGillivray, with whom she had two sons, Ryan and Max.

She was as enthusiastic a mother as she was training runners and raising millions, said Max, who lives in Los Angeles.

“Energetic doesn’t even cover it,” he said. “Her energy, her light, her celebratory nature was just infectious. Everyone will say it: she was a cheerleader in every sense of the word.”

Ms. Hurley found ways to make the marathon experience possible for participants facing a wide variety of hurdles, from spinal cord injuries to living without homes.

“The list goes on and on,” Max said, “and no person, in my eyes, was ever turned away from her light.”

Russell Hoyt, president and chief executive of Team Hoyt and the Hoyt Foundation, said Ms. Hurley was instrumental in helping the family organizations expand their reach and ensure their legacy after the deaths of his father, Dick Hoyt, and brother, Rick Hoyt, who had pioneered duo wheelchair road racing.

Russell said Ms. Hurley helped the organizations reach beyond the Boston Marathon to other major events, and to launch the Dick and Judy Hoyt “Yes You Can” inclusion grants, named for his parents, to assist families in getting their children with disabilities included in activities alongside non-disabled peers.

“Sue helped us do something new and more powerful,” Hoyt said, adding that “she was the type of person who made you want to be a better person yourself, just by spending time with her.”

A service has been held for Ms. Hurley, who in addition to her two sons, mother, and former husband leaves three sisters, Lisa First of Alvin, Texas, Mary of Norfolk, and Cheryl Cuoco of Wrentham; her fiancé, Barry Foland of Owings Mills, Md.; and three stepchildren, Elle, Luke, and Chloe McGillivray, all of North Andover.

In August, Ms. Hurley spoke at the opening of Gronk Playground on the Charles River Esplanade, which was funded by her friend Rob Gronkowski, the former star New England Patriots tight end.

Gronkowski was overcome with emotion more than once, speaking a few feet away from where she sat next to Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

When it was her turn to speak, Ms. Hurley thanked Gronkowski for his philanthropy and floated an idea: “Can we just make it official and sign him for a day so he can retire a Patriot?”

Several days after she died, Kraft and Gronkowski announced they would honor her wish.

On Instagram, Gronkowski wrote that “her strength and resilience were truly inspirational,” and added that “without Susan, there would be no Gronk Playground.”

In a CBS Boston interview posted on YouTube in 2023, a year after she was diagnosed, Ms. Hurley was back to her energetic pace, managing 500 runners and pushing that year’s fund-raising past the $4 million mark.

The cancer diagnosis had come as a shock, she said. A doctor broke the news a day after she had completed a 17-mile training run. In that interview, she was grateful for a reprieve treatment had brought.

“It is a miracle. I believe it’s God’s hand,” she said. “I really, truly, truly believe that there is a plan for me and I’m not ready to leave this planet and leave this earth. There’s work for me to do here.”

Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.

Saturday might have been an anticipated return to the Commonwealth for Brockton native AJ Dybantsa. 

But the BYU star and projected top-three pick in the 2026 NBA Draft didn’t exactly receive the warmest welcome on the parquet floor at TD Garden.

The Massachusetts product might have had plenty of family and friends at TD Garden for the 18-year-old forward’s first game back on Causeway Street since his days playing for St. Sebastian’s. 

But in a game against the No. 3-ranked UConn Huskies, Dybantsa and the No. 7 BYU Cougars were entering into enemy territory — with a majority of the Garden crowd donning Huskies gear. 

“Just coming in as a freshman — it’s like a new environment,” Dybantsa said. “I mean, I’ve played in NBA arenas before, but I haven’t played in one feeling like this. And obviously they brought a lot of fans and everything like that. So I just had to stay calm, stay poised.”

Be it a hostile crowd, initial jitters in his return to Massachusetts, or a daunting matchup against an imposing UConn roster, Dybantsa labored out of the gate in Saturday’s heavyweight bout in the Hall of Fame series. 

But not for long. 

After posting four points in the first half, Dybantsa helped turn a potential blowout for the Cougars into a nailbiter — finishing with 21 points over the final 20 minutes of play en route to an eventual 86-84 Huskies win. 

“That’s as high a level of shot-making as you’re going to see in college basketball,” UConn head coach Dan Hurley said of Dybantsa, who closed the game with a game-high 25 points, six rebounds, and two steals. “I mean, that guy with the threes — he hasn’t been making threes at least to start the year, he’s been a rim guy. But he had the whole bag going tonight.”

Despite Dybantsa’s heroics down the stretch, it wasn’t enough to topple a UConn squad that built an early lead and did not relinquish it — despite several attempts from the Cougars to claw back. 

For all of the talk of Dybantsa’s return to Massachusetts, it was also a welcome homecoming for Huskies redshirt senior Alex Karaban — with the Southborough native standing as one of three UConn players to post 21 points to go along with three rebounds, two steals, and a block.

“I loved it,” Karaban said of playing at TD Garden. “I mean, I definitely had this game circled. … It was special. Some of my favorite games of my UConn career were the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight games when we came here two years ago. So just being blessed to have the opportunity to come back here, play with another UConn squad was awesome. I loved every second of it.”

Advertisement

“I mean, AJ deserves it,” Karaban added of the hype around Dybantsa. “He’s one hell of a player, just what he’s done for Boston. … He deserved the homecoming too.”

That praise wasn’t necessarily shared by a boisterous UConn crowd, especially during the opening 20 minutes of action. 

As his offensive game labored in the first half, Dybantsa was subject to jeers of “overrated!” as his shots continued to clang off the rim.

All it took was a couple of successful jumpers early in the second half to help the explosive forward start settling into a rhythm. Once Dybantsa’s shots from both midrange and beyond the arc started to fall, what was once a 20-point lead for the Huskies started to drain as Dybantsa’s confidence grew. 

Even though he didn’t shred UConn in transition, Dybantsa used his strong frame to drive to the rim in crunch time — drawing fouls and finishing through contact. 

Advertisement

With Celtics Jaylen Brown and Derrick White in attendance, Dybantsa and the Cougars cut the lead all the way down to two points with under 30 seconds to go. 

But when handed a chance to take the lead, BYU’s Robert Wright III lost the handle on the ball — with UConn’s Silas Demary Jr. recovering the turnover to snuff out any hope of a Cougars comeback. 

Despite the setback for Dybantsa and BYU, Hurley doled out plenty of praise for the future NBA star — whose stock should continue to soar as this season continues. 

“Just the growth and his approach,” Hurley said of what has stood out about Dybantsa. “Sometimes you watch these kids, they come into college, these high draft picks, and it’s been over the course of years and years and years. You can see on film — the entitlement, the spoiled entitlement, the not guarding, the not being about the team. … I’m watching [his] evolution from game to game to tonight. 

“I mean, this guy’s out there guarding, he’s on the backboard, he’s communicating with his teammates, and he’s playing with a level of desperation to win the game.

Advertisement

“For a guy that’s going to be maybe the number one pick —  it’s a little refreshing to see this guy and the mental toughness. I mean, his first half was a mess, and for him to be able to put that behind him back home and putting that second-half performance on was as good as you’ll see from a freshman.”

 

Conor Ryan is a staff writer covering the Bruins, Celtics, Patriots, and Red Sox for Boston.com, a role he has held since 2023.

Sign up for the Today newsletter

Get everything you need to know to start your day, delivered right to your inbox every morning.

Advertisement