***

Crosby will be the last to say so.

“I’m a long ways away from that,” he said. “A lot of work to be done before I even want to talk about the potential of that.”

His deflection of praise, his reluctance to draw attention to himself, is partly a product of his upbringing in that modest, tidy home, surrounded by other modest, tidy homes, nobody better or different than anybody else, no matter how good you are.

It’s also a product of this place.

Ken Dryden and Roy MacGregor, in their book Home Game, saw in hockey “our struggle to survive and civilize winter.”

That’s why weekends in Cole Harbour revolve around its many churches and its only arena. They perform the same function in different ways. They’re places to come together, inside, out of the cold and dark. Their rhythms and rituals are shelter from the perils of the outside world. 

There’s a stone beach in Lawrencetown, a short drive from the arena, a narrow road wending its way through stands of birches, clinging to life on the rocks. It’s a bracing spot to visit in the winter especially. The knife-grey North Atlantic crashes against the stones, the sun turned abstract by the low sky, the wind threatening to carry a few brave kite surfers into oblivion. 

Sometimes our fates are defined by inches, an opening the size of a banged-up dryer door, a window the width of a puck.

Obsessives like Crosby first learn how much those inches might mean — to themselves, to their community, to their team, to their country — and next they become pathological about them, fighting to control what they can through practice and discipline.

But even for the most determined among us, even for the most gifted and deserving, sometimes something much grander decides our destiny. A lot gets drawn. The game breaks a certain way. The moon pulls the ocean, and the ocean pulls us.

There’s a sign at that beach in Lawrencetown, a warning posted by people who understand the natural order of things. “If caught, don’t fight the current,” it reads. “If you cannot escape, float or tread water.”

It’s hard to feel big standing on that beach, on the beaches where Crosby still runs every summer.