Within 11 minutes on a cold afternoon in November, a conversation that began about Auston Matthews was suddenly veering into something deeply personal. The hosts on OverDrive, TSN Radio’s afternoon drive show, had somehow drifted away from Matthews and into the parental fanaticism in youth sports, which prompted co-host Jeff O’Neill to spring a question on their call-in guest.



Ray Ferraro was a regular guest and a former NHL forward who had remarried and had a second set of children. He had just picked one of them up from school when he called into the show, and O’Neill was curious: “When you have, like, 20-year-old kids, and you’re engaged and you’re going to be married and she says ‘I want kids’ … how do you say yes to that question?”



Ferraro, who married U.S. women’s hockey star Cammi Granato in 2004, chuckled and suggested that he did not have much of a say in the matter. More than that, he told...