Hockey

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SASKATOON - Steve Yzerman has a few grey hairs.

Very few, mind, and you need virtually to be shoved into the back of his head by a television soundman to notice, but there are a few there in the head of the eternally youthful executive director of Team Canada - and this, of course, is still only December.

Come Sunday, February 28, 2010, the date of the gold medal game in men's Olympic hockey, a recount may be in order. But as of December 30th in a revamped agricultural show building on the outskirts of Saskatoon, the ageless Hall-of-Famer seemed as calm and sure of himself before the microphones as he once did on the ice for the Detroit Red Wings.

Sitting at a black-skirted podium on a stage before 3,000 cheering fans, Yzerman and his eight black-jacketed colleagues looked more like they were posing for Da Vinci's The Last Supper than releasing 23 names that have been praised, and in some cases cursed, on Canadian tongues for months. In some cases, for years - all the way back to the great Tragedy in Turin, when the country that invented the game of hockey came in a humiliating seventh after having won the gold medal the previous Winter Games.

Yzerman's assignment, far more onerous than that of the mere Prime Minister of Canada, has been to restore faith among those who can only be described as fickle true believers. They believe absolutely that Olympic gold belongs to Canada - but they just aren't sure if they can convince the rest of the world to let us have it back.

The night before, after a full day of debate with his fellow managers - Kevin Lowe, Doug Armstrong, Ken Holland - and his head coach, Mike Babcock, Yzerman admitted to feeling the pressure.

"It was the only night I found myself to be anxious," he said following the announcement.

He knew there would be pressure. "It's not like I didn't expect it or see it coming," he said. He had, after all, been on the winning and losing ends of Stanley Cup finals. He had won Canada Cups, won an Olympic gold medal, even managed a team that had gone to the gold medal match in the World Championships - but this was something quite different. In a country where cursing politicians and talking about the weather used to consume most of the small talk, the naming of the men's Olympic hockey team had become more anticipated than the naming of a new Pope. The faithful were expecting nothing less than perfection - and in the case of Olympic hockey, redemption.

Sometime around 6:00 a.m. the morning of the announcement, he sent a text message to Babcock: "You awake?"

Babcock was in bed with his laptop computer - breaking down the last game between his Detroit Red Wings and the Columbus Blue Jackets, if you must know - and he immediately sent a text back to Yzerman's hotel room: "Of course I'm up."

"You sleep in the summer when you coach," Babcock explained.

The decision-makers met again to go over the list one more time. They knew, as everyone did, that there would be no question about the three goaltenders - Martin Brodeur, Roberto Luongo, Marc-Andre Fleury - and none about the givens in other positions, such as Scott Niedermayer and Chris Pronger on defence, Sidney Crosby and Jarome Iginla on forward. But there were always questions about those further on down the line. Do you go with an untested kid like 20-year-old Drew Doughty on defence, or do you go with Mike Green, the NHL's leading scorer among defence? And what of the mysterious 13th forward? Patrice Bergeron, the Boston Bruins forward who hadn't even been invited to the summer camp, was now obviously in the mix - and Yzerman wouldn't even say that Bergeron could be considered the 13th forward picked. It wasn't so much about what was available as it was about what might be needed.

They worked with charts. They put up potential lines - often using players not named yesterday but still under consideration, such as Washington's Green or Philadelphia's high-scoring Jeff Carter. They put up charts from the gold-medal-winning 2002 team and the humiliated 2006 team and asked themselves "What was the difference? What didn't work?"

In the end, they had their decisions and knew there was no going back. Niedermayer would be captain - "He's our most decorated player," said Yzerman - even though some, like Lowe, believed there was "another candidate" who deserved consideration, obviously Crosby. Crosby, Lowe said later, burns with the same fire and need to win as man Lowe played with for years: Wayne Gretzky. Instead, Crosby, along with Iginla and Pronger, would serve as assistant - his time as captain to come later, but still certain.

The group split up the names to call before the live television announcement. Armstrong called young Doughty but no answer. He called again later and woke him up. A kid just turned 20, sleeping in.

Lowe called the Chicago defence pairing, Duncan Keith and Brent Seabrook, and one of them "used an expletive...but it was a happy expletive."

Holland called Jonathan Toews, the young Chicago captain, and the call went to a cell phone Toews keeps in Chicago for his mother to use when she's in town. She saw where the call was coming from and came running to get the phone to her son.

Soon enough, it was all over and the country could turn from debating who should be on the team to arguing over who was left off - all part of the Canadian hockey ethos.

Yzerman joked that he and his management assistants "have done our job - and we're turning it over to the coaching staff."

Babcock, a while later, said in a small scrum that while he had input, the team was Yzerman's to name, his to coach.

"The manager always makes the final call," said Babcock. "That's his job."

If it seemed they were distancing themselves from the possibility of another Turin, they weren't.

As Yzerman said, "We know full well the expectations of the country."