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And they did.

“The biggest thing I noticed is he raises the level of everyone else,” said Oilers forward Ryan Strome, who was kind of in awe after his first game as McDavid’s teammate. “Everyone tries to keep up with him and be as fast as him and work as hard. When you see your leader doing that you want to follow.

“And exceptional performance and I’m sure there’s many more to come.”

McDavid, who set the tone early with a partial breakaway on his first shift, was dangerous all night. He made it 1-0 at 11:01 of the first period, then blew past defencemen Travis Hamonic and TJ Brodie like they were statues to put the Flames away for good eight minutes into the third.

Then, with a Gretzky-like flair for theatrics, completed the hat-trick with 59-seconds left to once again move into the NHL scoring lead.

“It’s nice, a good way to start, I guess, but we have a ways to go here,” he said afterward. “It feels good tonight, but we have a long way.”

Blowing the doors off of two elite NHL defencemen, both of whom had angles on him, brought gasps from every corner of the arena.

“It’s what he does,” said head coach Todd McLellan. “He doesn’t go from first to second to third to fourth gear. He just goes from first to fourth and he’s gone. He was fresh and I think they had pieces of their fourth line out so he was able to take advantage of it.

“What was impressive about that goal was that the puck rolled all the way down the ice and he was still able to knock it down when he needed to and then put it in a little hole. A hell of a night by him and a good night by everybody around him.”