On the morning of Dec. 29, 2006, Kennedy Duguid and the Don Mills Flyers had a game scheduled against a team from somewhere north of the city and, due to inconsistencies in advance scouting for 10-year-olds, they did not know much about their opposition. So they had never heard about the nine-year-old who was playing with the older boys.

By the end of the first period, Don Mills was down 7-0, and it was down 11-0 by the end of the second period. The Flyers went on to lose 14-0, with the previously unknown nine-year-old scoring five goals and adding two assists.

“We got back to the room,” Duguid said, “and we were kind of just wondering: Who did we just play? What just hit us?”

The opposing team, the York Simcoe Express, had a roster that included two players who would grow up to become early-round picks in the NHL draft, with forward Sam Bennett (fourth overall, Calgary, in 2014) and defenceman Travis Dermott (34th, Toronto, 2015) well on their way to stardom.

Then there was that nine-year-old.

Connor McDavid is scheduled to make his regular-season NHL debut with the Edmonton Oilers on Thursday night in St. Louis, having been drafted first overall last spring. At 18, he has been compared to Wayne Gretzky and Sidney Crosby among others — there are T-shirts in circulation with the name “McJesus” printed on the back, for example.

It will be another step down a path that seems to have been preordained, one traced easily back to old holiday tournaments against bewildered schoolchildren. Those teammates and opponents say he was a skilled, self-critical, hyper-focused, goal-scoring dynamo; a star to those who knew him, even if they knew him simply as Connor.

“You see him skating around, doing the things he was doing at such a young age, I began to wonder,” said Duguid. “I was like, ‘What am I doing wrong if he’s already like this?’ ”

Cory Glassman was a defenceman with the Flyers and he left perhaps the largest imprint on the Don Mills’ scoring summary that December morning. He drew a pair of penalties, including a late call against McDavid.

“It was one-on-one with me and Connor and I just sort of . . . pulled him down,” he said, “because I knew he was going to score anyways.”

“He wasn’t just playing a game,” said Jack Doak, who was an assistant coach with York Simcoe. “That was his world. And he was going to be in that world no matter what. And you could just tell, from an early age.”

Sometimes he would be alone, and sometimes he would have company. Sometimes, his brother and his father would be with him, his father having been consigned to playing in goal. The one constant was this: Connor McDavid always seemed to be outside, training under the watch of a relentless drill instructor only he could see.

Home video of an 8-year-old Connor McDavid playing minor league hockey.

“He lives at the bottom of our street, and every day I would come home, he would be in the driveway with paint cans and sticks and a ratty old hockey net,” said Martin Harding. “And he’d be jumping over the sticks and putting the ball underneath the sticks and skating all around the driveway on his Rollerblades.”

McDavid would have been eight or nine years old at the time, he said. Harding, president of the York Simcoe Express, has a son who is only a few months younger than McDavid, and both grew up in Newmarket.

“I’d come home to my guy, and he’d be downstairs playing PlayStation, and I’d say, ‘Hey guess what Connor’s doing right now?’ ’’ Harding said with a chuckle. “In other words, ‘How come you’re in here and he’s out there?’”

According to the family’s story, McDavid was on inline skates before his third birthday, and he quickly shook off his father’s hand when they moved to the ice. Brian and Kelly McDavid have described how unusually comfortable their son seemed at such an early age.

“There were times where you would hear the conversation — maybe even within our own team — ‘Oh, well, Brian’s pushing him, he’s making him shoot pucks in the garage, he’s making him Rollerblade,’ ” said Jack Doak, the former assistant coach. “That had nothing to do with Brian. Brian would come home from a day at work and he would find Connor in the garage, and Kelly would say, ‘He’s been there since he frickin’ got home.’ ”

“He’d be outdoors, shooting pucks in the rain,” said former teammate Cody Van Lierop.

More than one former youth teammate said when they would go to his house, they would either be playing hockey in the garage or watching it on television, especially if Sidney Crosby was involved.

“He wasn’t distracted by anything else,” Doak said. “He wasn’t interested in watching cartoons or playing video games of any nature . . . unless maybe it was the NHL game.”

“You just felt like hockey was his everything,” said Dylan Yip-Chuck, who was captain of the Express.

The team, perhaps not surprisingly, seemed to win everything. York Simcoe won five Ontario Minor Hockey Association titles with McDavid in the lineup. McDavid won provincial championships in novice (as an eight-year-old), minor atom (nine), atom (10), minor peewee (11) and peewee (12).

Alex Nanos was the trainer for York Simcoe when his son (Jordan) was on the roster. He said McDavid scored plenty of goals and earned plenty of assists but that he was focused more on the plays than the result.

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“He’d come back and kick the boards and get mad at himself because he should have passed when he shot, or he should have shot when he passed,” Nanos said. “And it wasn’t because he didn’t get his sixth goal. He never celebrated or rode his stick or did anything goofy like that.”

McDavid would still only have been about nine years old at the time, he said.

“I used to look at him and go, ‘Are you having fun? Are you enjoying this?’ ” Nanos said with a chuckle. “It was amazing. It was an amazing thing to watch.”

McDavid and his father had a routine. Before a game, they would take an orange ball hockey ball into the hallway for a passing drill, often with Brian using one of Connor’s backup sticks, even though it looked so small in his hands. The ball would move at blinding speed.

“It was like an optical illusion or something,” said Yip-Chuck, the former captain.

McDavid would not yet have been 10 years old.

“A crowd of people would end up watching,” Yip-Chuck said, “because it seemed so weird that this little kid had such good hands.”

“There wouldn’t be any interest in what’s around them,” said Van Lierop, “or who was watching.”

On the ice, teammates said, it felt like McDavid was a step ahead. His family has spoken of how, when he started playing, McDavid would avoid the pile of kindergartners on the puck, waiting instead for it to squirt out to the periphery, where he would race with it to the goal.

Teammates and coaches with the Express suggest that intensive study continued into his elementary school years. Aidan Doak, a former York Simcoe goaltender, said it somehow seemed McDavid had “a better mind for the game” than his peers. Harding, the York Simcoe president, said McDavid had a superior sense of how to maximize the edges on his skate blades, and that he could “bounce pucks off the boards and pull it though your feet.”

“He could do stuff on the ice, in a regular game, that a lot of guys would only have the guts to do in practice,” said Van Lierop, who is now playing Junior A hockey in British Columbia, with the Victoria Grizzlies. “He went down on a breakaway, went through the legs, top shelf. I was in awe . . . it was unbelievable, some of the stuff he could do with the puck at any moment in a game.”

“It would never look like he was skating as hard as he could,” said Duguid, who now has an eye to playing collegiate hockey in the United States. “But somehow, he’d be going 100 miles an hour. Next thing you know, you turn your head, the puck’s on his stick and he’s gone.”

“It’s like he can slow down time, and do whatever he wants to do with it,” said Aidan Doak, who is between teams, having been recently released by a junior team in Alberta.

Yip-Chuck endured a string of injuries near the end of his competitive playing career, and is now studying business at the University of Waterloo. He has kept in touch with several players from the Express, and considers himself fortunate to have witnessed what he calls “the making of a superstar.”

“Even though he was younger than us, we all looked up to Connor,” he said. “When he said something to you, you took it a lot differently than if it was from somebody else.”

Yip-Chuck was normally a defenceman, but said he was asked to move up for a while, to play on a line with McDavid and Bennett, the future NHL draft picks.

“And I was terrified to go to practice, to play in games,” he said. “Because if I messed up or something like that, Sam and Connor, they’re so emotional about hockey it was like, ‘I don’t want to let these guys down.’”

By the time he was 15, McDavid had left the Express for a team in Toronto. Soon, there would be newspaper and television profiles. By the time he reached the Ontario Hockey League, he was already expected to be a star.

And he was. Last season, his last with the Erie Otters, he finished with 120 points in 47 regular-season games. The Otters fell to the eventual Memorial Cup champion Oshawa Generals in the OHL final, but McDavid still finished with 49 points in 20 post-season games.

His candidacy as the first overall pick in the NHL draft was never in doubt.

“McDavid, you could tell when he was eight — and we were all nine — you could tell he was going to be something special,” said Aidan Doak. “You could tell he was going to be in the NHL. I remember me and my dad joking that he was going to be the next Crosby.

“But now, he actually is.”