PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—Chris Kelly’s two eldest daughters drew posters for their dad so they could show him on FaceTime. He checks in morning and night while he’s in South Korea. They drew their dad, of course. Every kid would.

“There was more Canada,” says Kelly, the captain of this most unusual Canadian men’s Olympic hockey team. He held his index finger and thumb a couple inches apart. “I was about this big and everything else was much bigger, rightfully so.”

This is the Olympics in which the hockey and Olympic worlds let NHL players slip away, so Canada’s team is a hodgepodge of the best of everybody else. Kelly, of course, played 833 NHL games over 14 seasons with Ottawa and Boston. He won a Stanley Cup in 2011 and lost in the final in 2013. But at 37, he was at the end of his NHL life.

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And now he’s here, on Team Canada for the first time in his life. As he puts it with his crooked grin, “I don’t think it’s really even sunk in, what this is. Part of me kind of hopes it doesn’t, because then it’d be terrifying.”

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The funny thing is, Kelly has had a career most Canadian kids would kill for. He loved hockey from the moment he tried it: loved the game, the work, the dressing room. He was first on a select team at age eight. But he never considered the NHL to be much of a possibility, really. Rico Fata and Manny Malhotra were the local stars when Kelly was growing up in Bowmanville, and playing in and around Toronto.

“Those two really jumped out,” says Kelly. “But then there was Joel Ward and guys like myself that maybe weren’t . . . I think a lot of people would say, ‘They made it?’ And to be honest, they have every right to say that. I think we were products of being on good teams with good coaches, and I like to think being good people.”

It wasn’t that he was just another guy. He wasn’t. But when Kelly was 19 and playing for the London Knights, Rick Nash showed up at age 16, and then Kelly found out what hockey superstardom was.

“He was a 16-year-old kid, and you just knew he wasn’t going to be playing long in junior hockey,” says Kelly. “And he hadn’t physically matured, like he is now, but he was just better. Just better than everyone else. As soon as you stepped on the ice, you could just tell. Speed, skill, awareness, the way they think the game.

“Some guys just do it on sheer talent alone. Some guys need to be taught the game properly, and learn where to be and make right decisions and be a good teammate and be a good person, and I’ve been extremely fortunate to have good guidance along the way.”

Hockey needs good guys. Nash, of course, played for Canada in 2010 and 2014, along with all the other guys who became whispered legends at some point, as they rose through the country’s hockey machine. Here, Canada is made up of the kids who grew up and went places and now are old enough but not too old, good enough but not too good; the extras from the machine, scattered for one reason or another across the world.

Kelly, for his part, wasn’t sure if his career was going to continue, after being an occasional extra forward on Ottawa’s run to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference final last year, but he threw himself into it. Some veteran guys he knew hemmed and hawed as their careers got tenuous, and if you do that in hockey as an older player, you’re dead. So he worked, and was skating with Carleton University players when the Senators asked if he wanted to play for their American Hockey League affiliate in Belleville, Ont. Kelly was nervous that first game back.

And then he got the call from Team Canada, and the Spengler Cup in December was his first international game. So after a lifetime as a good guy who made good, as a guy who was part of the show but never the show, what does this — representing Canada at the Olympics — mean to him?

“You know, it’s just — I guess the best way to describe it, I was fortunate to be in Canada when the team was announced, not many guys were,” he says. “I’ve had, I like to think, a great hockey career, and been on good teams, and been fortunate to win a Stanley Cup.

“But what I never got was neighbours coming up to me and telling they were proud of me. Proud to make the Canadian Olympic team. I thought that was pretty cool. When people say that, you’re kind of taken aback at the time. People say congratulations, great job, but nobody’s ever said, ‘We’re proud of you.’ Besides your parents.

“I was (in that house in Ottawa) when we won a Stanley Cup, and went to the finals (in 2013), and last year we had great success in Ottawa, but I never really had that. They never talked to me. They were great neighbours.”

Kelly grins.

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“When you grow up you think the NHL would be great, but the Olympics are so far off the radar that you can’t even dream that big. To be here, I don’t think words can do it justice. It’s such an honour. This was too big to dream.”