For most of us, a call like that would have undone us.

But for Emergency Dispatcher Sharon Carey of Skowhegan's Somerset County Communications Center, when the call came in from a woman in Rockwood whose husband had just threatened to kill her with a loaded shotgun, it was a time to get to work.

Whether Carey's pulse was racing and her heart pounding, we don't know. What we do know is that along with two other dispatchers at the county center, she calmly spent the next 92 minutes helping the woman keep herself and her two 10-year-old children safe.

While dispatchers Tammy Barker and William Crawford worked the phones to get county sheriff's deputies out to the rural location, Carey talked the woman through the process of barricading herself and the children in an upstairs room in the family's home.

Ultimately, Carey was able to talk the husband into leaving the house; he then was arrested, charged, convicted and jailed. He's now on probation and attending domestic violence court.

Meanwhile, Carey and her colleagues continue to do their jobs -- calmly and now with the assurance that their quietly heroic efforts have been noticed.

Carey, Crawford and Barker have just been awarded the Communications Team of the Year honor from the Maine Chapter of the National Emergency Number Association. And while the award is an important and well-deserved recognition of their professionalism, we bet that the three Somerset County dispatchers would have been just fine without the award.

Who needs honors like that when the real reward is saving people's lives?