LAHTI, Finland — Finns were still a weird, foreign concept to NHL teams in the 1980s.



Some teams scouted Finland, and a few players made it over to North America, but many of that era’s top Finnish players never left home. It wasn’t until Teemu Selanne’s landmark 1992-93 rookie season with the Winnipeg Jets that anyone in the NHL really took notice of Finland as a hockey nation.



So when a 23-year-old Kari Takko went to his first NHL training camp in 1985 with the Minnesota North Stars, he was the only Finn in camp. The goalie was an outsider speaking an alien language in Minnesota. His name — well, it led to some interesting interactions.



“I didn’t know what the Taco Bell chain was,” Takko said with a laugh back in August. “So my first training camp some local TV asked me if I have a little time. I said yeah, my (English) was just so-so. First question he asked me was, ‘You are not from Mexico, are...