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control.”
    Certainly Roy’s reputation is of a fiery, at times unpredictable, competitor. His mannerisms—the once-novel butterfly style, talking to the goalposts, refusing to skate over the bluelines—made him both noticeable and often controversial right from his very first season in Montreal, and there remains a bit of an edge to him.
    He does not care to be reminded of his inevitable retirement. He says, somewhat curtly, that he has never considered the fact that he could be on the verge of becoming the first goaltender to win Stanley Cups in three different decades. He bristles when someone suggests that he and New Jersey coach Larry Robinson were once teammates in Montreal a long time ago. “Maybe for you,” he says, “but not for me.”
    He does concede, however, that experience, not time, has had its effect on him as a goaltender. “There are things that are different,” he says. “I don’t think I’m as quick as I was then, but experience sometimes will make up for that. I’m still moving pretty good side to side, but I know there are things that I was doing better then than I do now, and there are things that I do now that are better than I was doing then.”
    No matter how it’s done, however, the results seem to remain exactly the same: Patrick Roy finds a way to win final series. No wonder Colorado coach Bob Hartley calls him “the spine” of the hockey club.
    â€œPatrick has given us a chance to win every game,” says Hartley. “He’s given us the belief that if we give him the necessary offensive support, he’s going to take care of the rest.”
    Patrick Roy retired in 2003 after a still-remarkable season in which he went 35–15–13 and posted an impressive .920 save percentage. He won four Stanley Cups, three Conn Smythe trophies as the top player of the playoffs and three Vezinas as the NHL’s top goaltender. In 2006 he was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame. In retirement he became owner and general manager of the Quebec Remparts junior club, taking over the coaching duties and winning yet another championship: the Memorial Cup
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WITHIN ARM’S REACH: RAY BOURQUE
(
National Post
, May 26, 2001)
    DENVER, COLORADO
    P erhaps there should be a statute of limitations on playoff beards.
    Ray Bourque should be excused, for there is something about his snow-dappled chin stubble that makes him look more like a middle-aged executive at the end of a two-week canoe trip than an elite NHL defenceman at the beginning of what he hopes will be the best two weeks of his career.
    Without the stubble Bourque could pass for thirty, a superbly conditioned athlete without an ounce of fat and with a head of hair so thick and water resistant it has been compared to an otter’s pelt. With the stubble he looks more than what he is, forty, and it serves as a prickly underline to the daily sidebar attached to this year’s Stanley Cup final: “Win One for Ray.”
    Raymond Bourque is forty going on forty-one. He is in his twenty-second NHL season. He won the Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie in his first season and five Norris trophies as the league’s top defenceman in the seasons that followed. He has scored, in that time, a remarkable 410 goals and 1,169 assists for1,579 regular season points and added another 178 points, and counting, in post-season play. He has played 1,612 regular season games and, this evening against the New Jersey Devils, will dress for his 208th playoff game. He has, however, one small shortcoming in that remarkable record: “I’ve never won my last game.”
    This will only be Bourque’s third final in those twenty-two springs. In 1988 and 1990 he led the Boston Bruins, the team he played almost twenty-one seasons for, to the final against the Edmonton Oilers, but both times the Bruins were easily defeated. This, he feels, is his best chance—and likely his