PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA—As the men’s Olympic hockey tournament headed into the semifinal round, it was a stat that stood out: In 15 meetings over 86 years, Canada has never lost an Olympic match to its impending opponent, the national team of Germany. But Sean Burke, Canada’s general manager here, has first-hand memories of a time it nearly did.

That was in an Olympic quarterfinal in 1992. Maybe you’ll remember the era. Canada, wearing red and white sweaters and blue pants, was led by a 20-year-old future Hall of Famer named Eric Lindros. The Germans, in bulbous yellow Cooper helmets, managed to hang in long enough to force overtime, and then — a novelty at the time — the first medal-round shootout in Olympic history. After Lindros scored on Canada’s sixth shot, Germany had a last chance to extend the proceedings.

Peter Draisaitl, father of a future Edmonton Oiler named Leon, shot forehand and briefly celebrated what he thought was a goal, the puck dribbling through Burke’s stacked pads and meandering threateningly toward the goal-line.

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“Oh, I remember it,” Burke was saying here Thursday. “I still don’t know why I was doing the two-pad stack on a shootout.”

The teetering disc, as it turned out, stopped dramatically atop the goal-line. Canada, bullet dodged, would go on to take a gold-medal chance into the deadlocked third period of the tournament final against the Unified Team, the post-Soviet Russians, before winning silver. But the lesson of the German near miss was clear.

“The problem with the whole game was we knew we were going to win — it was just a matter of time,” Lindros would say in the contest’s wake. “And we didn’t get our butts in gear until it got down to the nitty gritty.”

With that in mind, maybe it’ll be slightly less tempting to consider Canada’s game against the Germans a formality. Never mind that Canada’s roster has scored a combined 2,140 NHL points — more than four times as many as the combined career output of Germany’s players. Still, the Germans are coming off an upset 4-3 overtime win over Sweden. And the players on the Canadian roster who are familiar with their next foe are urging caution to anyone looking ahead to what would be Canada’s third straight trip to a gold-medal game.

“We definitely can’t underestimate them. We can’t take them lightly,” said Justin Peters, the Canadian goaltender who plays for the German league’s Cologne Sharks, captained by German national-team defenceman (and former NHLer) Christian Ehrhoff. “I think they’ve got an older group. They’ve been together for a while. I think that’s a huge advantage for them to have that chemistry. They have a lot to prove. They have an awesome opportunity. So do we.”

Indeed, the Olympic stage, along with a chance at the coveted hardware, is also a potential career-reclamation showcase for those who use it correctly. Certainly goaltender Kevin Poulin’s professional stock rose dramatically during Canada’s 1-0 quarterfinal win over Finland, wherein Poulin came on in relief for the injured Ben Scrivens and looked every bit an NHL-worthy puckstopper.

“That’s probably one of the better stories (on the team) considering he played a game in the Quebec senior league this year at some point,” Burke said of Poulin.

Actually, that oddity of a single game played came with the suburban Montreal entry in the Quebec-based North American Hockey League, an enforcer-focused goon loop where Poulin found himself practising between jobs before he found work in the Austrian league. Poulin said he played a single game on a lark, allowing five goals against but avoiding a fight.

“As a goalie, it’s hard to practice alone on the ice,” Poulin said.

Poulin, like more than a few of Canada’s players, clearly considers himself an NHL-level talent who’s never had the proper break. Since playing 50 NHL games over five seasons with the New York Islanders, he’s been out of the league, spending time in the AHL and the KHL. But in vetting Poulin before selecting him to the team, Burke said he figured he’d stumbled on a gem when he spoke to former Islanders goaltending coach Sudarshan Maharaj.

“(Maharaj) said, ‘I don’t know why he’s not in the NHL. He’s a guy we always thought would develop and become a player,’ ” Burke said. “That’s a position, as much as there’s great stories, there’s also guys who just fall through the cracks. And sometimes it takes them a long time. They bounce around and who knows?”

Poulin, who figures to be Canada’s semifinal starter with Scrivens still nursing what Burke described as a shoulder injury, said he regrets nothing about his Islanders tenure.

“I did what I had to do and they made their decision,” he said. “I don’t have much to say about that.”

That same chip-on-the-shoulder outlook is evident in the other star of Canada’s quarterfinal win. Maxim Noreau’s cannon of a slapshot provided the game’s only goal, but it wasn’t the only bit of footage that suggested Noreau has looked like an NHL-level defenceman here, albeit in the proverbial small sample size against a group of non-NHLers. Noreau, an undrafted journeyman who played a few games with the Minnesota Wild most recently in 2010-11, thought he’d done his European time back in the summer of 2014, when the Colorado Avalanche signed him to a two-year deal out of the Swiss league. But Noreau didn’t see a single game with the Avalanche, playing two years in the AHL before heading back to Switzerland.

“I thought I had my other shot when I went back to Colorado on a two-year deal. I didn’t really get any games to show what I could do,” he said. “Obviously that was disappointing for me, to come back to Europe was tough when I thought I deserved better over there. For sure, this (Olympic chance) is huge for me. But I’m not really thinking about that. I want to win a gold medal.”

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Maybe that’s one of Canada’s strengths as it ponders a way to improve its all-time Olympic record against Germany to 16-0. Can a roster dotted with underdogs who feel they’ve been overlooked really fall into the trap of overlooking the underdog?

And even if that’s a possible hazard, what with the winner of Russia-Czech Republic looming in the distance alongside a shimmering golden prize, Burke always has that 26-year-old cautionary tale to tell.

“Lots of people from Germany still send me hockey cards and notes,” Burke said. “And that’s what they always want to talk about: The one that almost went in.”

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