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It was late November 2014, Forbes Robertson and I sat at our kitchen table, and he told me all about his friend, Chris McNeill.

They had grown up together in Halifax, as Forbes put it, “playing hockey, loving the Nova Scotia Voyageurs and worshipping Les Canadiens.”

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Chris was a goalie. As Forbes later wrote to me, “You and your teammates were the heroes of our Saturday nights,” like “Santa Claus and Spider-Man,” except that “you were real-life heroes we could and would emulate, tirelessly, on driveways and deserted tennis courts, ponds and lakes, my bustling backyard rink, and Halifax’s dingy old minor hockey arenas.”

And, as he related, nobody was luckier than they were.

“The Habs won nine Cups in the first 13 years of our lives.”

Chris was so big a fan of the team and of me, Forbes said, that as I had written in The Game where my goalie idols as a kid were “Hall, Sawchuk, Plante and Bower,” his were “Dryden, Dryden, (Voyageurs goalie) Eddie Walsh, and Dryden.”