Fictional characters and mythical heroes tend to be admired for their made-up exploits, and rightly so, for they inspire many who live vicariously through the heroic exploits of others.

But what of those rare individuals who perform their own brand of heroics — for real — those who step out from the ordinary mold and demonstrate the extraordinary?

Does saving a drowning person’s life, making one’s mark as a woman in a still male-dominated business world, going head-to-head in men’s hockey games as the only woman player, and rescuing a helpless creature from certain death ‑ do these qualities constitute heroism?

Meet 28-year-old Kerry Blomberg. Born and raised in Monticello, Minn., where it’s really cold, she is the oldest of three sisters — and with a father who had long yearned for at least one son.

“My dad loved all three of us dearly, but since he did want a boy in the family, he raised us that way,” she said. “Our parents signed my sisters and me up for everything … and that included hockey. Growing up in Minnesota, it’s just something you’re going to learn.”

To look at Blomberg, your mind says, “Volleyball player … track … cross-country … But hockey? No way!”

Seeing her in action, though, the answer to that is: “Oh yes!”

Childhood and teenage years prepared Blomberg for pretty much anything.

“My parents also introduced us to the joys of pontoon boating on lakes … and were firm believers in heating our home with a wood stove; so chopping wood was a requisite in our family,” she said

Blomberg, who excelled athletically and academically throughout high school and college (graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in hospitality management), would one day call upon her family-bred athletics when she and her mother both put themselves at risk for another person.

“The girl was about 18,” she said. “Her car had gone off the road and into a lake ... and no one was helping her. So my mother and I pulled up and dove into the water where the car was sinking fast, with the girl trapped inside.”

This was Minnesota, where the water is frigid.

“We tried prying open the doors and windows to get her out, but we didn’t have any tools and couldn’t get it open,” she said. “Fortunately an off-duty firefighter happened by and stopped. That man was a godsend. He had tools in his trunk and with his help we were able to free the woman from the car.”

Blomberg beamed as she told of the town later presenting them with the Citizen’s Award. And somewhere, a woman who nearly lost her life — but for the bold intervention of three brave Samaritans — is also beaming.

She had cause to beam again when her professional life blossomed and took an upswing.

“I was working for Hormel Foods as a service rep, my dream then being to one day run my own resort in Minnesota,” she said.

A call came for her to relocate east for a territory managerial position, first to Maryland and then to Connecticut, where she would meet her future husband, Ernest Tautkus of Uncasville.

She would also find a hockey league that welcomed her talents — a men’s league, on wheels instead of blades.

“It was actually a Wednesday night pick-up league,” Blomberg said, “a ‘dollar-in-the-bucket’ if you wanted to play.”

Equally adept on roller skates as well as on ice skates, she is the only woman in the Eastern Roller Hockey League, skating on a team sponsored by Hayes Services. They play on spring and fall weekends at a rink next door to the Groton Public Library. As one spectator remarked: “She’s the only woman out there, and she’s incredibly fast on those skates!”

But Blomberg has proven wondrous in ways other than helping save someone’s life, attaining excellence in her profession and competing evenly with men on the playing field. She also demonstrated the kind of spiritual interaction with nature and its creatures that one usually hears of only in television documentaries or in works of fiction.

This one came in the form of a crippled little sparrow deemed unfit for survival.

“My husband and I were painting the house when we found it,” she said. “Ernest turned to me and said, ‘We can’t just leave it here ... we have to save it.’” And so they did, reading up in books and online and speaking with those knowledgeable in bird lore.

“We put the bird in a little basket and covered it with paper towels,” she said. “Her eyes were closed, she had no feathers, and her entire body was pink.”

As for feeding their yet-to-be-feathered friend: “We found that simple syrup, moist dog food and hardboiled egg would give her the nutrients and sugar needed for nourishment and growth.”

The process, though, was anything but simple and it fell mostly to Blomberg, while Tautkus worked on the house.

“I fed her every 30 minutes with a thin wooden stick as though I were her mother,” she said. “And since I work online, and Ernest was home working on the house, we were able to keep up the daily 30 minute feeding cycle, which went on for about four days.”

The tiny sparrow grew quickly once her feathers came in.

“We knew we had to get her strong enough to eat on her own if she was eventually going to survive in the wild,” Blomberg said. She paused in her recollection, as though saving the next part as the clincher. “Once her eyes opened, it became clear she had imprinted on me! She began flying back-and-forth between us, making sounds that came out as ‘jeep-jeep.’ So that’s what we named her,”

She added with a smile of satisfaction, “We enjoyed having Jeep-Jeep inside the house with us. We fed her mostly meal worms. And when it seemed she had grown enough, we took her outside and showed her how to pick at the dirt and find her own worms.”

An obstacle then reared itself for the kindly couple in their quest to reintroduce their rapidly growing fledgling to the wild.

“She refused to leave us back then, so we started bringing her outside and putting her up in the trees. Jeep-Jeep was nearly full-grown, so we knew we had to start introducing her to other birds, sparrows especially. It worked! She’d stay with them throughout the day until we’d call her by name and then she’d come back in for the night.”

Yes, this all actually happened between a lost, crippled baby bird, and a wondrous woman aided by an amazing young man. And ultimately, as with any bird acting in accordance with Mother Nature’s dictates, Jeep-Jeep left the nest.

Little over a month after this stunning adoption, the now full-grown sparrow alighted briefly on the shoulder of one of its adopted human parents, then amazingly lifted off and soared away as if offering an acrobatic farewell of assurance, departing the human world to take her place in the realm of her fellow avian kin.

“We gave her the best chance for life,” said Blomberg, “and she took it.”