Near the end of a 1,000-mile dog sled race, in the middle of the night in the middle of Canada’s Great White North, a 44-year-old man who grew up in Evanston hitched his hopes to an indomitable 7-year-old Alaskan husky named for the running back who had pulled the Bears to many a triumph.

And Walter pulled Hugh Neff’s team to the first victory of his mushing career after the closest finish in the history of the Yukon Quest, a race many consider tougher than the better-known Iditarod.

“This was all about heart, and Walter had the heart of Sweetness,” Neff said by telephone Tuesday from Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada.

At 5:14 a.m. local time Tuesday, almost 11 days after he and 14 dogs had left Fairbanks, Alaska, Neff had become the race’s 29th winner by just 26 seconds over Allen Moore. The smallest previous winning margin was four minutes in 2009, when Neff was second.

“It was quite a comeback,” said Neff, a Loyola Academy graduate who moved from Evanston to Alaska 17 years ago and began sled dog racing three years later.

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