Hey Mom! Mom! Mom, look at me! I’m doing a somersault. I’m hopping on one foot. I’m scratching my left ear.

— P.K. Subban craves attention.

If only they wouldn’t shoot to one corner, deflect the puck to the other, make me split to one side, then back again, and throw up my glove to the top corner to catch it. It’d be a lot simpler.

— Carey Price prefers to avoid it.

Price is not as shy as he seems. He’s understated. It’s as if he learned something in his first awkward years in Montreal. He arrived to a mediocre team that had been mediocre for longer than Canadiens’ fans like to remember. Price had a prodigy’s talents and promise. He played so well so fast, he made the team seem better than it was. When it foundered, the task was, for Price, like trying to rescue a drowning man. So desperate to be saved, flailing about, the team, the fans, almost drowned him. He had a choice — get out of Montreal. Or learn. He decided to stay.

He learned not to show anything — on his face, in his words, in his body language. He would not ride Montreal’s roller coaster of highs and lows. He would stay somewhere in between. He had his own emotions. He would not allow Montreal’s fans and media to get to him. He had to be stronger than their hopes and fears, or be crushed by them.

On the ice, always spare in his movements, he has stripped them down even more. One of his predecessors, Patrick Roy, liked to make the impossible look impossible. Price likes to make the impossible look easy. For Roy, it was as if he was saying to opponents, I can do the spectacular, and you can’t. He challenged them. Price’s message is different. You think that was spectacular — look at my face. That was nothing. I have so much more in me. Price doesn’t challenge his opponents, pushing them to be better. He defeats them.

Subban is his antithesis. Hey Mom, hey opponents, hey world, I’m here. His size, the fluid, forceful grace of the way he moves, his black skin in a mostly white-skinned game, his confident, risky style. Subban could be only scratching his left ear, and people would still notice.

Sometimes he tries too much. He joined the Canadiens for the team’s unexpected run to the conference final against the Philadelphia Flyers in 2010. The Canadiens struggled to score. With offence coming from nowhere else, Subban tried to do more. He wasn’t ready, and the team wasn’t good enough to respond. He made countless errors; the Canadiens lost. Some felt embarrassed for Subban; others admired his futile try.

He has improved in the years since, succeeding more, failing less. He was chosen to play for Canada in the Sochi Olympics, but participated in only one game. Team Canada coach Mike Babcock and his staff, with the strongest, most solid team in the tournament, decided they didn’t need Subban’s upside to win, and couldn’t risk his downside. In this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs, Canadiens’ coach Michel Therrien, facing a better team, the Boston Bruins, knows he needs Subban — his upside, even living with his downside — to win.

Subban makes mistakes. He tries to deliver big hits, and sometimes misses. He makes big plays; and bad plays when he doesn’t need to make them. After being run by Scott Thornton and ducking out of the way, with Thornton injuring himself, but mostly after a few games of “P.K. just being P.K.”, Don Cherry warned him not to “poke the bear.” The Bruins are proud and tough. They can hurt you. Play them at their normal intense, committed level, and you might beat them. Provoke them and you might awaken something you can’t defeat.

But Therrien and Subban might just have to take that risk. Going nose to nose with the Bruins as Subban does, his small quick teammates play quicker and feistier. If Subban was to play in only a routinely effective way, the Canadiens would generate a nice, noble, hard-trying, “get ’em next year” performance, and lose in six games.

That said, P.K. couldn’t be P.K. without Price.

They are an interesting pair. Price grew up in the B.C. interior, his mother a former chief of the Ulkatcho First Nation, his grandmother forced into residential schools as a child. Subban, his father from Jamaica, his mother from Montserrat, grew up in suburban Toronto. They came together on a legendary French-Canadian team, but whose names have also included Morenz, Harvey, Robinson and Gainey, not just Richard, Beliveau and Lafleur. They came together in a remarkable Canada and in a remarkable Quebec that may now be more diverse than any other place on Earth. Price and Subban would not be much more popular now if their names were Tremblay or Bouchard.

The Canadiens need them, and Price and Subban need each other. Mr. Less is More, and Mr. More is More. Without Price, Subban’s game would be too risky. Too many goals would go in. His coaches and teammates, the media and fans would grow frustrated and angry. His ice time would diminish. Unable to do all the things he has in him to do, his spirit would change. Price, not only a defender but an offensive force, gives Subban the chance to fly.

Without Subban, Price would not have discovered all that is in him. Subban’s mistakes force Price to find new twists and contortions; new ways to stop the puck. At the beginning of this series, Price and Bruins’ goalie Tuukka Rask had been seen as about equal. Price has found a new level; Rask not yet. But Subban also sets up plays and scores goals. A big goal is only big when a game is close enough to make it matter. Price makes it that way. And a big save is only big if a goal, scored earlier or later, makes it so. That’s what Subban does.

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They are a high-wire act. The Bruins, a deeper, more talented team, stand on the platform at one end of the wire, and shake it. Harder and harder. Price and Subban may fall. But each is hanging on, willing to try.

Ken Dryden was the Hockey Hall of Fame goalie for the Montreal Canadiens for eight seasons in the 1970s.