A somewhat more mellow Lamoriello, now 67, last night was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, honored in the Builders category for his near quarter-century of excellence as the top dog (CEO, president, general manager and occasionally the coach) of the New Jersey Devils. During his tenure, the team that so aptly mirrors its boss - driven, hard-working, no-nonsense, ever-attentive to detail and spiced with an underlying toughness - has won the Stanley Cup three times (1995, 2000, and 2003) in four trips to the finals and has reached the 100-point plateau in 11 of the past 15 seasons.

“Lou’s out there screaming at the guy, ‘What’s this! Pack these dogs up . . . get ’em outta here!’ ’’ said Burke. “The poor slob . . . didn’t know what hit him . . . and he gives Lou some lip. That really set Lou off. ‘Look,’ Lou screams, ‘you’ve got five minutes to get these bleepin’ dogs back in their boxes, get ’em outta here. Five minutes! And if you don’t, I’m telling you, I’ll start strangling them, one by one, with my bare hands!’ The guy had to think Lou was nuts. No question. But you know what? He got outta there, dogs ’n all.’’

Burke and his fellow Friars then turned their attention back outside, watching gleefully from their hotel rooms as the diminutive coach from the Dominican Friars college located in Rhode Island’s capital - dedicated to a “spirituality that embraces the whole person’’ as its stated mission - transformed into a ferocious bulldog.

“I called Lou’s room,’’ said Brian Burke, then a pugnacious, 185-pound Friar forward, recalling a memory of more than 30 years ago. “And I said, ‘Coach, you’re not going to believe this, but some guy’s got a bunch of dogs outside here . . . they’re making a real racket, and there’s no way we’ll get to sleep.’ Lou screams, ‘What?!’ then says, ‘I’ll be right there!’ and hangs up.’’

How were they to know their empty bellies and incessant barking also infringed upon the peace and serenity that Lou Lamoriello, then coach of the Providence College hockey team, expected his players to have the night before a game? Lamoriello’s steadfast curfew was already in place for his Friars, in town to face the University of Vermont the next day, and his one hockey team wasn’t about to sleep if the two teams of championship sled dogs kept wailing louder than a mid-winter’s gale off Lake Champlain.

The dogs were hungry, yelping feverishly, growling and nipping at each other as their prideful owner spread them apart and staked them to their individual feeding stations across the snowy grounds of a Vermont hotel. These were prized sled dogs, top athletes, relentless competitors, deserving of good meals and special handling.

Standard-bearer Considered an NHL outsider, and therefore a bit of a quirky fit when hired away from Providence in 1987 by then-Devils owner John McMullen, the Rhode Island born and raised Lamoriello turned a league laughingstock into one of the game’s most durable, consistent performers, almost perennially in the hunt to win the Cup. Long gone are the days when the Devils, now the pride of a downtown Newark renaissance, were the sorrowful, faceless vagabonds (nee Kansas City Chiefs) plopped at the side of Exit 16W on the New Jersey Turnpike. Dubbed a “Mickey Mouse’’ franchise by superstar Wayne Gretzky in the 1983-84 season - immediately following a 13-4 pasting by Gretzky and his Edmonton Oilers - the Devils under Lamoriello have become a standard for both professionalism and performance. Considered an NHL outsider, and therefore a bit of a quirky fit when hired away from Providence in 1987 by then-Devils owner John McMullen, the Rhode Island born and raised Lamoriello turned a league laughingstock into one of the game’s most durable, consistent performers, almost perennially in the hunt to win the Cup. Long gone are the days when the Devils, now the pride of a downtown Newark renaissance, were the sorrowful, faceless vagabonds (nee Kansas City Chiefs) plopped at the side of Exit 16W on the New Jersey Turnpike. Dubbed a “Mickey Mouse’’ franchise by superstar Wayne Gretzky in the 1983-84 season - immediately following a 13-4 pasting by Gretzky and his Edmonton Oilers - the Devils under Lamoriello have become a standard for both professionalism and performance.

“The work ethic of our players when I arrived, in my opinion, was outstanding,’’ said Lamoriello, reflecting on his life and career some 10 days ago with his Devils on Causeway Street to face the Bruins. “But the thing I noticed most upon arriving, having come from a winning culture at Providence, is that simply working hard was not enough. Unless you get to your full potential, both as a player and a staff, that’s the only way you win. You never want to be satisfied with mediocrity, accepting ‘working hard’ as anything more than a prerequisite. So we had to make A-to-Z changes. I’m talking off the ice, in the room, in the [front] office . . . and I’m talking right down to how many times the phone rings. To this day, if you call the New Jersey Devils, you’ll find that it won’t ring more than twice if you call. That’s the rule.’’

A call to the Devils’ main number yesterday, mid-afternoon, was picked up just as the second ring began. Even with the boss away and about to be enshrined in Toronto alongside the likes of Punch Imlach, Sam Pollock, and Conn Smythe, house rules prevailed.

Lamoriello goes in with a star-studded class, including Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Luc Robitaille, and Brian Leetch.

Burke, now the GM of the Maple Leafs and a Cup winner in his days as the Ducks’ boss, said the two-ring rule applies no matter who is on the line. Over years of frequent calls to Lamoriello, he said, he has been routinely placed on hold whenever a member of the Devils’ staff has had to answer another line. It’s just one of Lou’s Rules, central to who he is, which Burke first learned in his playing days at Providence, where Lamoriello led the Friars to 12 consecutive postseason tournaments in his 15 years behind the bench.