For nine hours on Saturday, June 13, there will be a great circling of compassion, companions, and caring both on and off the track at Newtown High School’s Blue & Gold Stadium for the 2015 edition of local American Cancer Society’s Relay For Life. For 11 years, the community has gathered in this way in late spring for some consciousness- and fund-raising on behalf of ACS. More than $2.5 million has been raised in that time in a spirit of celebration in the face of all the trouble and grief that every cancer struggle entails.

Each year, Newtown joins more than four million people in over 20 countries who have taken up the baton in this remarkable relay. Only an effort on this scale can take on not just one type of cancer, but the disease itself in all its forms. So much progress has been made over the years in developing targeted and immunotherapies in addition to fostering healthier lifestyles and comprehensive cancer screening programs. Despite all the good work that has been done to date, the need is still acute. This year, an estimated 589,000 men and women will die in the United States of the four major cancers — colorectal, lung, breast, and prostate. In Connecticut this year, there will be nearly 22,000 new cases of cancer diagnosed and 6,840 deaths.

These are big numbers that lead the ACS Relay For Life to set big goals each year, but we believe this annual event makes its biggest impact by highlighting the small stories of this continuing human struggle with an insidious disease. As much as we band together for this campaign, pool our money, and gather the combined efforts of a committed crowd, the true inspiration for this fight comes from individual people and their individual families who work through every setback and discouragement, every tough course of treatment and rehabilitation, to seize the possibility, no matter how elusive, of remission, recovery, and health. Cancer can be a deadly disease, but it causes the light of life to burn so brightly in the people it touches.

So let us celebrate those lives, those lights, with luminarias, and laps, and all the good-natured competitions and entertainments that make Newtown’s annual Relay For Life so poignant and so fun. The event runs from 3 pm to midnight. If you are not signed up for one of the relay teams, show up at the Blue & Gold Stadium to cheer them on. There is no admission fee. Whether you stay for just an hour or straight through to midnight, you will join the momentum of that great circle as it turns year-by-year toward a cure.