Brendan Shanahan is comfortable with words, but he can’t figure out how to describe how he feels, one day before the season begins. It’s not nervous, precisely. Interested? No, much stronger than that. He hits one. “Alive,” he says in his office at the MasterCard practice facility, which overlooks the ice. “I’m struggling to find it, but it’s like the feeling I used to have before a season. It’s a mixture of excitement, fear, adrenaline.” Alive.

It took a long time for Shanahan to circle back to the beginning, but here he is. When he was a boy in the Toronto suburb of Mimico, the youngest of four brothers, he would run with his older siblings through the same streets he drives now when he comes to practice. He left at 16 to play junior in London; he was, to his great surprise, in the NHL at age 18. He played his second ever NHL game here, a Leafs home opener. He returned to his high school’s dance the night before.

“It was completely natural to go,” Shanahan says. “My friends were still in high school. It wasn’t dumb to go. What was dumb was to tell one of my teammates where I was going.”

His mother still lives in that same Mimico house, his three brothers are all nearby, and for years his high school friends have been treating his big moments — Stanley Cup celebrations, Canada Cup celebrations, his Hall of Fame induction last year — as reunions, as they have grown older and started families. That makes Shanahan feel good. Not one of them has asked for a thing since he was put in charge of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

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It’s been a long road to this place, and the roots are deep.

As a boy Shanahan’s parents would let him figure things out for himself, as parents do with their youngest children. “I wasn’t over-coached,” is the way he puts it. “When I fell, no one picked me up. I picked myself up.”

So Shanahan fought and he chased his brothers and he fell in love with lacrosse and hockey, and every time he went up a level in hockey, it suited him more. When they took off the cages in junior hockey and the game got nasty, he was better. When he got to the NHL and had to play with men, tough men, he was better. Shanahan played with a presence, with so much of himself; he scored goals and he fought and he burned, all the way through.

That drive and his curiosity led him here, step by step. Shanahan didn’t read much in high school, but became a voracious reader once he was in the NHL; he took an English course after his third season in the league, and came away quoting from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He took a cooking class during the lockout, before realizing he needed more to do, needed more challenges, which was a surprise to him. He’d never had enough time off to realize it.

“I’m interested in people,” Shanahan says, in a dark blue suit with a white shirt. “I like to have dinner with interesting people. I’m curious about people. There were teammates who didn’t want to go to dinner with me because the dinners were three hours. I don’t have dinner; I dine. I never understood NHL players that had room service.

“To me, I’ve always recognized when I’m in a good place, and it’s probably something that helped me as a player, and helped dictate the style that I played. I didn’t want to leave any stones unturned. I take sides, I have opinions. It’s not a safe way to live.”

So he shepherded the post-lockout changes to the game, and was hooked on the notion of having a finger on the pulse of hockey itself. When he retired, though, he joined the NHL to find out how it worked behind the curtain, and had to re-wire his brain.

“I had dreams for several years that it was game day, and I remember saying to my wife, when is this gonna stop? When am I going to stop dreaming that I’m a player?” he says. “I remember towards the end of my career, talking to guys when I was retiring and saying, I’m happy not to be so emotionally invested in wins and losses anymore. It was just so taxing.

“I remember watching the first couple of playoffs, and I would never watch games when I played, because I would get emotionally invested in the game, and I felt like it was my night off . . . It didn’t relax me. I got too wound up. And I remember saying my first year in retirement, the playoffs, saying this is amazing.

“And (after a while), I wanted to have an emotional attachment again to the game. And that’s when I knew that eventually I was going to want to be with a team again.”

He spent those five years in the NHL head office, being handed more and more responsibility, learning the politics, the business, the corporate world. He likes to find out what he doesn’t know, and he didn’t know a lot.

“First day at work, it was 5:15 and I said, how do you know when we can leave?” he says. “I was joking about it, but I was like an infant. But for me, learning new things and getting out of your comfort zone is, for me, exhilarating. And I guess that’s the word that maybe best describes me now. I’m exhilarated. And part of that is all those emotions of adrenaline, fear, excitement.”

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Shanahan doesn’t like comfort zones, even though he has come back to a place where he is comfortable. Running the Maple Leafs is a completely new challenge, a wholly new thing. The 45-year-old will ask questions all season, and the players and staff and city will answer them. Before games, he used to walk though the busiest parts of the arenas in Detroit and St. Louis so he could get to know the people working there, to forge more of an emotional attachment to the city. He thought it helped him, gave him more to burn.

“In Toronto,” he says, “I don’t have to find a route to become emotionally invested in this city and this team. Being born in Toronto does not necessarily make you a good executive with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

“But this . . . was a very personal decision. This, to me, would mean more than anything I was able to accomplish as a player, because I am so emotionally invested in this place.”

His roots run deepest here, all the way down. His father Donal developed Alzheimer’s when Shanahan was 15. His brothers were all gone away to school; Shanahan was about to go play for the London Knights and really pursue hockey. His mom didn’t drive. And his dad was starting to disappear.

“Driving, at night especially, to games and stuff, me, my mom and my dad were all white-knuckling it,” Shanahan says, a little quieter. “We knew something was wrong; we didn’t know for sure what it was. And they took me to get my learner’s permit, and we drove through back streets to get there, Airport Road. Because he couldn’t go on the highway anymore.

“And then when I passed, he handed me the keys and I drove home on the highway. I think in some ways it taught me a lot about not sitting on the sidelines, and the way I try to live and the way I tried to play and the way I went to dinner with teammates and the way I tried to consume everything I had, was as if it was the last time I was ever going to do it.

“I was probably shaped a lot by that; that realization that something can be taken away from you like that.”

His best friends are still the boys who were his friends at 15. His family’s still here. And the first time he won the Stanley Cup he had a couple hours between a Mimico street party and another party, and he loaded the Cup in the car and drove away without telling anyone where he was going. He worried it would be disrespectful to take it to his father’s grave on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, if anyone else was there.

“But it was really strange — it was a perfect day, and there wasn’t another soul in sight. So I pulled it out, carried it over, put it down, and just sat there for 30, 40 minutes.” He is quiet for a second, his great worn face stony, before changing the subject, just enough.

“Then I took it to Apache Burger. You ever had an Apache Burger? It was an old high school hangout, on Dundas. Great spot.”

It took 30 years, more or less. But Brendan Shanahan came home.

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