The first thing you need to know about Peter DeBoer is that he was already famous long before he got here, and he’d just as soon keep that to himself.

But here’s the whole truth: About a hundred million people — give or take a few — held his work in their hands, and they didn’t even know it.

“I had the worst job in legal history,” the Devils coach explains. “I was working for the legal department of a software company one summer, and I wrote the disclaimers on the boxes of floppy disks.”

He means: This product has been tested and found compliant with blah-blah-blah and pursuant to Part XVII of FCC rules blah-blah-blah and covers defects in material or workmanship for blah-blah …

Yes, well. Pure poetry, that was.

“Right, I can’t even remember any of the language,” he says. “I only know that it could put you to sleep.”

Then, with a burst of laughter: “And now you know why I’m in hockey,” he adds.

Candidly, DeBoer tells you that he once thought he’d use his law degree to become a player agent. You don’t seem like the type of guy who relishes the idea of swimming with sharks, we suggest. “Some of my best friends are agents,” he replies, attempting to deadpan it before laughing again. “But the deeper I got into it, the less interesting it seemed to be.”

So that’s how he got into coaching, 18 years ago, with the Detroit Whalers of the Ontario Hockey League — the juniors — where the job is mostly bad hotels and long bus rides throughout his native province and “just as much parenting as it is coaching.”

In other words, it was nondescript and anonymous, but he was better at it than anyone else.

Even now, this is an impact guy that nobody ever sees coming, one with a talent for hiding in plain sight. Put it this way: The Devils are going back to the playoffs after the unfortunate John MacLean detour, yet we know virtually nothing about the modest, 43-year-old coach who got them here, other than the fact that he looks a lot like your son’s high school math teacher.

We’re sitting in the bleachers of a dark practice rink, the only light muscling its way through the windows that face Lafayette Street, and we don’t expect him to shed much more light on his résumé than this: After 13 years in juniors and three seasons in Florida, he’s altogether nonchalant about reaching the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time in his career.

Perhaps that is why the Devils celebrated this achievement with handshakes and a quiet procession to the team bus after clinching a spot in Raleigh on Saturday night.

And perhaps this understated celebration says more about their head coach, who is — we’re guessing here — obviously far from satisfied, and therefore sees little reason to break out the Bollinger?

“There was some of that,” Zach Parise, the captain, concedes, “but we all expected to make the playoffs, so it’s not like we felt the need to start taping up lockers. But yeah, this way more fits Peter’s style.”

Here’s the coach’s recap of the celebration that wasn’t: “Typically, I don’t address a team after a game unless there are special circumstances,” DeBoer says. “But I basically congratulated them for the work they put in, and reminded everybody that there are larger expectations, and we’ve got a lot of steps to go still. And that was it, really.”

Fair enough. But consider: It was a year ago Monday that DeBoer was fired, which was an odd decision for Dale Tallon to make, given that the Florida GM had sold off every decent veteran the Panthers had for a parade of post-adolescents. Nine weeks later, Lou Lamoriello hired him, and if you cupped your ear that day last July you heard sound all over Jersey: Who? You also thought, Lou couldn’t do better than this? A juniors guy who didn’t make the playoffs in his three years in Sunrise?

Now we know the answer. No, Lou couldn’t have done better.

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Anyone who coaches a hockey team has to deal with a tangled pathology, but DeBoer has handled his affairs with a medical efficiency. We daresay that he is a worthy Coach of the Year candidate, but for the fact that he won’t get a single vote because the higher-profile guys in St. Louis and New York are going to hog most of the Jack Adams ballots.

“He deserves that recognition,” Parise agrees, “but I’m not sure it matters. We know how good a coach he is.”

Let us count the ways. In a very short time, DeBoer proved Ilya Kovalchuk was a two-way player, and that the Russian’s selfishness was not a permanent condition. He stuck to his vow to get Martin Brodeur more rest, and got a ton of great games out of Johan Hedberg.

He squeezed another good year out of Petr Sykora, who lost a stride but can still bury it at age 35. He transformed David Clarkson into a major player. He restored Parise as the pulse of the team.

Just last week, he worked Travis Zajac back into the mix with zero disturbance, dropped super rook Adam Henrique down to the third unit, and now he has four productive lines buzzing like deranged wasps. He has a historic penalty-killing unit, and he’s brought a dead-last offense into the upper half of the league.

Indeed, this coach has been flawless with every move of late, even calling off a morning skate last Thursday — a decision that was rewarded with 11 goals in the next two games.

He pulled the plug on Adam Larsson — stroking the kid in the process — and then got 19 credible minutes from AHL callup Peter Harrold in the shootout win over Chicago.

All this is not coincidence or dumb luck.

“A lot of us have had a lot of coaches in our careers,” Patrik Elias says, “so you recognize when you have a guy who understands hockey and knows how to guide things, especially how to approach player relationships. This coach does all that as well as anybody.”

Oh, and DeBoer also decided that he is going to be the pebble in John Tortorella's shoe, and even if you think that spectacle at the Garden was pointless — we'd agree with you there — the Rangers know that for the first time since the Pat Burns days, the Devils have a coach who is not reluctant to counterpunch.

“To me, this organization has always stood for a few things,” DeBoer explains. “And when you’re led by a guy like Lou Lamoriello, having a backbone is one of those things.”

If anyone predicted this, they probably knew DeBoer better than the rest of us. Which means they also know that he's going to deflect any of the credit we give him here today.

Still, he's off to his first NHL playoff.

Ready to swim with sharks, you might say.

“I don’t think things change, coaching-wise, in the playoffs,” DeBoer says. “That thing you hear — ‘This guy’s a playoff coach, that guy isn’t’ — I don’t buy it. You’ve already been in the trenches for 82 games, and that’s a huge measure of a coach.

“But I’ll be honest, if I was sitting in Florida, getting in (to the playoffs) would have been satisfactory, and the celebration might have been pretty big. But this isn’t Florida, or juniors. This is much bigger than that, and we’ll be ready for it.”

Fair warning. Just in case you still don’t see him coming.

Dave D'Alessandro: ddalessandro@starledger.com