ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Millions will watch on television across the United States and Canada. More than 100,000 will come to Michigan Stadium, almost certainly setting a world record for hockey attendance. CF-18 fighter jets will fly overhead. The Zac Brown Band, Mayer Hawthorne and The Tenors will perform. The Toronto Maple Leafs will face the Detroit Red Wings in the 2014 Winter Classic.

At the center of the spectacle will be this: an inch and a half of ice, atop less than a quarter 0f an inch of aluminum flooring, atop a chemical solution pumped from a refrigeration trailer, where the temperature can be tuned to within half a degree.

“Everything revolves around that,” said Dan Craig, standing in a fourth-floor club area of the Big House, looking down through a window, literally overseeing the construction of the rink below. “If that doesn’t happen, everything else goes out of orbit.”

Craig is the NHL’s senior director of facilities operations, better known as its ice guru – “for lack of a better term,” he laughed. That means everything revolves around him. If he doesn’t do his job, it affects the players, coaches, fans and countless others. Hockey is a game of inches, and it is played on a surface of inches, and at the highest level it doesn’t matter if the game is indoors or out, if it’s a routine night or special event.

“It’s a regular-season game,” said Craig, wearing a scruffy beard, insulated overalls and work boots, “and that’s where the stress is.”

The early weather forecast looks good for New Year’s Day: cloudy, with a high of 20 degrees Fahrenheit. But playing hockey in a stadium is a challenge no matter what, and the Winter Classic is just the beginning this season. The NHL isn’t putting on one outdoor game. It isn’t putting on two. To boost the business coming out of last season’s lockout, it is putting on six, including one in Los Angeles. How’s that for stress?

Asked to name the biggest advancement the NHL had made since its first outdoor game 10 years ago, Craig doesn’t mention technology or logistics. He sounds like, well, a guru.

“Patience,” he said.

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Craig grew up in Jasper, Alberta, in the same Canadian Rockies where they filmed “Mystery, Alaska,” the 1999 movie about a small-town team facing the New York Rangers on a frozen lake on national television.

He wanted to make plays, not make ice. His favorite player was Stan Mikita. But there were lots of good players, and he said “you find out very soon that you don’t have what they have.” He found out something else before long: He was interested in what the good players depended upon. “I was always amazed and fascinated by the skill of players, and I wanted to make sure that they had the best,” he said.

He began working at his high school rink at age 15, and it was not the glorious job of driving the Zamboni. “You’ve got to start way below the Zamboni,” he said. “There’s dressing rooms to clean and toilets to scrub. Start there. You work your way all the way up the chain.” He worked all the way up to making the ice for the Edmonton Oilers, the best ice in the NHL.

Then, in 1997, he went to work for the NHL itself. One of his first projects: building a rink on top of an empty swimming pool at Yoyogi National Gymnasium in Tokyo so the Vancouver Canucks and Mighty Ducks of Anaheim could play two regular-season games to open the season. He said it was probably 72 degrees with 68 percent humidity, and they used the same style of floor and the same type of piping they are using now at Michigan Stadium.

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