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Because it’s not a pleasant process. After all, it’s much better to be the face of the franchise than the voice of the excuse.

That C gets awfully heavy.

“Where you can get into trouble is if you’re watching (sportscasts) all the time, following (the league) all the time, and not getting that mental break away from the rink,” Giordano says. “I think it’s important to release when you get away.”

Iginla, more than two years removed from his time in Calgary, reflects on the grind. When games were bad, interrogations were, to be polite, predictable.

“The questions do get old.”

He remembers thinking at various times over the years: “I don’t have any new answers, I don’t know the reason.”

But it comes with the territory.

“When you guys come in, you want to talk to the captain about what’s going on, right?,” says Iginla, a 10-season captain of the Flames, now an alternate for the Colorado Avalanche. “We don’t have a lot of choice. We don’t get to say, ‘No,’ on too many nights.”

Ference agrees.

The chore falls to one chap.

Meaning with the Edmonton Oilers — who wobbled terribly during Ference’s C-wearing term (2013-15) — the microphones were jabbed in his direction on a regular basis.

That part didn’t faze him.

What had been tough, though, was determining an appropriate tone.

“It’s a fine line … you can only B.S. for so long,” says Ference, chatting recently at Rexall Place. “You have to have some semblance of honesty in your answers. You can’t feed a line to your fans … for too long. These are knowledgeable people that are watching the games.”