Lukas Head was watching the game when an old photograph flashed across the television screen showing P.K. Subban, not quite 10 years old, mugging in the foreground as Steven Stamkos smiled over his left shoulder.

There was a third boy, a third teammate, in the frame.

“I was like, ‘What the heck? Hold on,’ ” Head said. “I rewound it and I’m like, ‘Holy sh--, that’s me.’ ”

“He was so excited when he saw it,” said Melissa, his fiancée. “He put it on Facebook; ‘I was on TV.’ ”

“I got chirped for a good little while for that,” he said. “Like, ‘What happened to you?’ ”

Through the 1998-99 hockey season, Head was a forward with the North York Canadiens novice Triple-A team, a roster that featured three future NHL players. Chris Tanev, now a defenceman with the Vancouver Canucks, was in that lineup, with Subban and Stamkos.

They did not lose many games; maybe three, maybe five, depending on the speaker. They rolled to the league title, and the picture shown on television was one of dozens clicked in the winning dressing room that day at St. Michael’s College School Arena.

This summer, with Subban surfacing in trade speculation and Stamkos set to become the most coveted unrestricted free agent in recent memory, two of the most popular names of the NHL off-season will have come from the same novice hockey team in Toronto.

Head, the third face in that famous photo, will also have his hands full.

He and Melissa are planning a getaway wedding in Jamaica next May. They have a nine-month-old daughter, Claire, who has her father’s sharp blue eyes. They have two cats and one dog, a docile German shepherd mix named Clover. They are also renovating the basement in their comfortable suburban Toronto home, on a verdant street tucked into the eastern fringe of Oshawa.

Head, who works in construction, made it to Tier II in hockey but walked away when he was 18. He said he misses the game, and that he wanted to play again this year, but that real life raised an objection.

“It was really slow at work, so I kind of had to choose if I really wanted to pay the money,” he said with a shrug. “It’s not cheap, that stuff. And I’m doing the basement renovations and everything so it was like, ‘Okay, I’ve got too much money going out.’ ”

“And the wedding,” said Melissa, on maternity leave from her job as a nurse.

He chuckled. “Lots of money.”

“There was a worry about being laid off,” she said.

“Just in case,” he said. “I wanted to make sure I was good for money with everything.”

Head, like Subban, is 26 years old. And like Subban, he was a physical force on that team from North York. They played full contact that season, even at nine and 10 years old.

“He was a crusher,” said Doug Sheppard, their old coach. “Big kid, hit hard.”

Sheppard would often roll Head out on a line with Stamkos, who was younger and much smaller than many of his teammates. Head was asked to be the muscle, to be the one who drove into the corner to retrieve the puck for his unusually gifted linemate.

“Luke was an integral part of that team,” said Sheppard. “He wasn’t a third-liner.”

Subban was a forward that season. He was big, kind of plodding on his skates, but he was also the first player Head had seen with a powerful slap shot at that age.

“No one really knew how to do the slap shot,” Head said. “But his dad was one of those guys . . . they were up over the glass every game and stuff like that, just freakin’ and screamin’. You could tell (the parents) would be serious in getting them further.”

Head moved to a different team the following year. He played late into his teens, until he suffered a serious groin injury, which started to tip the scales. Hockey became less fun.

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“I ended up having games every Friday and Saturday night,” he said. “All the parties were going on.”

Head still has the trophy he won with the Canadiens. He had never seen the photo they showed on television until it hit the airwaves.

He would like to get it autographed.