A former Detroit Red Wing and New Jersey Devil, the 58-year-old Fetisov is still dripping with sweat while speaking after the legends game.

In his immediate vicinity, other megastars—Sergei Fedorov, Pavel Bure, Alex Mogilny—are also holding court. While Fetisov’s press responsibilities have allowed him to remove nothing more than the top layer of his equipment, his neighbour, Valeri Kamensky, who won Olympic gold with the Soviet Union in 1988, is fastening his watch, completing the dapper look of a 50-year-old man who could leave the room and walk right onto a billboard.

Alexei Kasatonov may not cut the same sleek figure as Kamensky, but it’s still impossible to see him around Fetisov and not think about the incredible defence tandem the two once formed. The collection of talent in and around the room is staggering, and with many of those men having stayed involved in the game during their post-playing days—Fedorov is GM of CSKA Moscow; Mogilny is trying to get more covered rinks built around his home in the poorer, eastern part of the country—it’s easy to hold out hope for the future.

“We’ve just got to keep believing in [our] nature and the culture,” says Mogilny, standing a few feet from the ice surface where he once again formed a line with Fedorov and Bure. “We’ve always been strong spiritually, always been playing for each other. I don’t see any problem with Russian hockey; everything’s going in the right direction.”

Though Fetisov seems to believe that, too, he acknowledges the bumps. In particular, he expected the establishment of the KHL would have done more to push things forward by now.

“We still cannot get on the same page with all these parts of the hockey program,” he says.

The search for synchronicity also has a lot to do with Tretiak, the legendary goalie.

As president of the Russian Ice Hockey Federation, Tretiak’s tasks include figuring out how to keep young talent in the country as long as possible and overseeing the construction of national teams that some accuse of giving preferential treatment to KHLers for the purpose of glorifying the domestic league.

One day before Fetisov and Co. were feted on the ice, Tretiak was re-elected to another four-year term on the IIHF council. Voting occurred behind closed doors at the Radisson Royal Hotel Moscow, and when the session let out, Tretiak was bombarded from all sides.

After dealing with a barrage of microphones, he was swarmed by a group of volunteers all clad in the distinct yellow T-shirt of tournament sponsor Raiffeisen International. If they’d all been wearing bike helmets, you’d have sworn a bunch of Tour de France winners had cycled into town for a photo with the Hockey Hall of Famer.

The English interview Tretiak conducted was stunted not only because it was done through a translator, but also because people from places like Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan couldn’t get enough of him, pulling him away to joyously inform him of which position they used to play on the ice.

While Tretiak’s smile might not quite match that of his fawning admirers, he’s still got one of the best grins going in a land where they can sometimes be scarce. It came out while he discussed the thrill of winning the 1981 Canada Cup and didn’t disappear completely when he talked about the tough economic landscape in Russia that would seem to make establishing further infrastructure a challenge (Tretiak says the government is committed to building another round of rinks after 2018), or how sport schools are trying to get more kids interested in playing defence.

Then again, difficult conditions are nothing new for a 64-year-old who certainly would have been an NHL star had he not been born in 1952 under Communist rule.

“We never had easy wins,” Tretiak says, “not in the Soviet era, not now.”