While a room filled with police officers and masked people can conjure images of a bank heist gone terribly wrong, there was an entirely different vibe coming out of Signatures at Bayside on Friday, May 7: one of appreciation. In what has undeniably been a trying year for nearly everyone on this spinning globe of ours, and a particularly difficult one for first-responders in our section of the world over the past several weeks, people gathered together for the Joshua M. Freeman Valor Awards. It was a day to honor police, firefighters, paramedics and EMTs for their selfless and courageous efforts on behalf of our area citizenry, and, to some extent, a day to celebrate people just being together again, after more than a year of, well⦠not.