Quitting hockey at 14 was not the hardest decision Chris Stewart had to make. It was the only decision he could make.

Older brother, spiritual lighthouse and professional trailblazer Anthony was gone. Billeted with a wealthy family 2 1/2 hours away, the 16-year-old was chasing his NHL dream as a promising junior in the Ontario Hockey League.

Their parents, handyman Norman and homemaker Susan, still had to feed half-a-dozen children in their hardscrabble Toronto household, including Chris’ five younger sisters — then ages 12, 11, 10, plus 9-year-old twins.

“Hockey was costing at least 10 grand a year, definitely 10 grand my family didn’t have,” Stewart said last week. “I wasn’t going to ask my parents to make that sacrifice, just to invest in me. I was just going to play high school football. It just made more sense at the time.”

Hand-me-down cleats, soft hands and 265 pounds of bulk were all the high school sophomore needed to thrive as a varsity tight end, and Stewart’s size and skill set sparked chatter about a college scholarship.

“He could catch anything near him,” recalled Greg Foulidis, a former high school football coach.

Keeping the family refrigerator stocked was not Stewart’s only motive for swapping skates for spikes.

By escaping Anthony’s shadow, Stewart stubbornly forged his own athletic identity by ditching two pivotal developmental years in Canada’s competitive triple-A hockey system.

“I was naïve, rebellious, thinking I could do it my own way and try to make my own path,” the popular Wild fourth-line winger said. “I didn’t realize having that older brother, what he could actually do for me a couple years later.”

Stewart almost destroyed his NHL career in the making, one Anthony helped revive, ultimately rocketing the protégé past big brother in their shared vocation.

Twelve years later, Stewart is thriving in Minnesota, a veteran leader on a Stanley Cup contender who refuses to wallow in the hard knocks of a childhood that scarred and shaped him.

When you grow up dirt poor, sharing subsidized housing in roadside motels with drug addicts, hookers and criminals, the monotonous practices, grueling road trips and unpredictable ice time in the NHL still feel like Christmas Day.

Lucrative paychecks offer Stewart and his family financial security he could only dream about at the start of the millennium, and he welcomes the opportunity to give back.

Just before Christmas, Stewart and his wife, Holley, donated a washer, dryer, video game console and alarm clocks during a visit to a Hope 4 Youth shelter in Coon Rapids, which provides basic needs for homeless families and at-risk children.

He also partnered with another local organization, HopeKids, to fill an Xcel Energy Center “Stew Crew” suite during home games.

On the ice, Stewart’s tangible contributions have been crucial to the Wild’s soaring success this season. He has 11 even-strength goals with nary a minute of power-play ice time.

Moreover, the team is 10-0-1 when Stewart scores.

Signing veteran free-agent Eric Staal gave Minnesota the No. 1 center it has coveted for years, a reliable two-way player who has helped balance a once-stagnant forward lineup. Re-acquiring Stewart on a two-year, $2.3 million contract to play gritty minutes, cheerleader and policeman has been priceless.

The power forward is one of the Wild’s glue guys, a gregarious and appreciative colleague who strengthens bonds in the dressing room by protecting teammates and holding opposing tough guys accountable.

Standing 6-feet-2, 239 pounds, with a rust-colored goatee stabbing down from his chin like a stalactite, Stewart is an imposing figure who can administer justice quickly. He also is one of the first players on the bench to bang his stick on the boards to salute a teammate who blocks a shot or dominates a shift.

“I don’t know if he gets enough credit for the way he helps this team,” said captain Mikko Koivu. “He notices the little things, things the big crowd doesn’t see. He’s very vocal. If you say something, you want to back that up, too. He does, every single day. It’s important he knows that we see that.”

HEARTBREAK MOTEL

Every NHL player has a back story of roads traveled or bypassed. Anthony Stewart’s unconventional journey to first-round stardom dragged Chris along for the ride before their rags-to-riches journey forked and baby brother advanced as his mentor regressed.

“Get in where you fit in; he learned a bit of that from me,” Anthony Stewart said. “But I had to go against the grain and do it the wrong way, and maybe paid for it because I’m out of the league.”

Chris has earned stature as a 10-year NHL veteran but takes nothing for granted in a vagabond career that has cycled through Colorado and St. Louis, Buffalo and Minnesota, Anaheim and back to the Wild.

“When I was younger, it was more about me and I was a little bit selfish, didn’t really get the whole team aspect,” the 29-year-old acknowledged during a recent interview at his locker. “Looking around the room, everyone in here’s been a first- or second-rounder. Everyone here has scored 40 or 50 goals in juniors. Everyone has numbers. It’s about having a role and taking pride in it.

“Now that I’ve been on a couple of teams and I’m older, I understand the big picture and how important it is to buy in. It’s all about sacrifice.”

The Stewart brothers know the pain and power of sacrifice better than most.

Norman Stewart grew up on a farm in Jamaica and immigrated to Montreal in 1974. He was in his early 20s and knew nothing about hockey, but Norman fell in line with passionate Canadiens fans and fell in love with the Habs as they dominated the decade with six Stanley Cup championships.

He met his wife, Susan, in the early 1980s after moving to Toronto. Anthony was born in 1985, Chris two years later. By 1995, the Stewart family had expanded to seven children.

Mom managed the household the best she could while dad found sporadic work installing pools and landscaping.

“We didn’t thrive, we survived,” Anthony said. “Mom kept the family together, making sure we felt special. We didn’t have big steak dinners, but she made sure we were clothed and fed. All my sisters are 5-10 or 6 feet tall. I’m walking around at 275 right now.”

Rent payments, however, were a constant struggle. One eviction landed the family at the East Side Motel, one of several roadside inns Toronto social services contracted with to shelter the homeless.

The single-story, L-shaped refuge had a marquee advertising hourly, daily and weekly rates. It was transitional housing at best, a dead end for most and no place to raise a family, with prostitutes turning tricks in parked cars and alleyways.

“It was heartbreaking and probably something I should be in therapy for,” Anthony said. “We made the best of a crappy situation.”

Growing up poor didn’t mean the Stewarts actually knew they were poor.

“It was just regular life to me,” Chris said, chuckling. “When we were bouncing around from motels to motels, there were other families there. So you don’t really know until I got to be 14 or 15 where you actually start to understand the concept of a dollar.”

Norman Stewart passed along his love for hockey to his sons, scraped up enough money for used equipment — typically it was too big for the boys — and walked with them two miles from the motel to the local rink.

The kids lugged hockey bags through snowstorms and bitter cold. Sometimes they would hitch rides with sympathetic parents of teammates. They groused about frozen toes, duct-taped sticks and their lack of transportation. But they never quit hockey.

It was too much fun. And the Stewarts were good at it, so their hockey community closed ranks.

When Anthony was 9, he moved in with Shirley Ziemendorf and her husband, whose children were teammates of both Stewart brothers, to get out of the nearby house league and play against better competition.

The Ziemendorfs welcomed him into their house like a son and bought Anthony new equipment for two seasons, ensuring Chris would have plenty of hand-me-down gear.

“They were good kids, and after a while they became just like my own kids,” Ziemendorf remembered. “It was one of these families where they didn’t have a lot of money, seven kids, a mother who kept everybody together regardless of what situation they were in, a dad that had his ups and downs, but the end result was he raised good kids.”

Talent and work ethic helped the Stewart brothers succeed as young amateurs, so much that other parents chipped in to cover yearly registrations while arena workers looked the other way instead of collecting game fees.

Talk about pressure to produce.

FOOTBALL CALLS

When Anthony was 15, he made the Kingston Frontenacs of the OHL, one of Canada’s three major junior leagues, and moved away.

Without his older brother to provide guidance and residual benefits, such as clothing and regular rides to the rink, Chris gave up triple-A hockey in ninth grade to play high school football at West Hills Collegiate Institute.

Foulidis, then an assistant football and hockey coach at West Hills, insisted Stewart keep skating for the high school team. Unlike Minnesota’s premiere prep programs, high school hockey in Canada is an intramural afterthought.

NHL aspirants need not apply.

“To miss out triple-A at 14, 15 years old was crazy, with his draft year coming up, so I said, ‘There’s no way you’re not playing any hockey,’ ” Foulidis said. “His size worked better for him in football than hockey. All the football coaches were salivating over him, but I saw him more as a hockey player and wanted to protect those hands.”

Meanwhile, Anthony became a prolific goal scorer and first-round NHL prospect. In June 2003, the family traveled to Nashville for the Entry Draft. The Florida Panthers selected him 25th overall.

Sitting in the arena, hearing his older brother’s name called, watching him walk across that stage to greet NHL commissioner Gary Bettman and pose for photos, Chris Stewart had an epiphany: “Why couldn’t that be me?”

“I was always a good hockey player, always had the skills growing up,” he said. “From that day forward, I just made a vow to myself that’s what I wanted to do and I was going to do whatever it took to get there.”

Anthony Stewart later saw Chris playing pick-up hockey one day and told him in no uncertain terms he was un-retiring. He leveraged his draft status to get a tryout for Chris with Kingston.

Then-Frontenacs coach Larry Mavety was eager to appease his top scorer until he took one look at the 265-pounder in his midst.

“I told Anthony, ‘He’s gonna have to lose a lot of weight,’ ” Mavety recalled.

Chris spent the summer of 2004 training in the early morning with Anthony and running the streets of Toronto in trash bags under the hot afternoon sun. He shed 20 pounds and reported to training camp eager to make an impression with his playmaking.

The Frontenacs had other ideas.

“In our league, you’re always looking for something that’s been missed,” said Mavety. “Nobody had really seen him. He hadn’t played in two years. Anthony was always going to be the star. Chris was a lot more physical and, I’d have to say, meaner. Anthony didn’t have the mean streak Chris has got.”

So, Chris Stewart cemented his reputation as a walk-on enforcer his rookie season. Then he went to work diversifying his game, scoring 37 goals among 87 points his second season. He finished his junior career with 91 goals, 108 assists and 271 penalty minutes.

In June 2006, just three years after recommitting to hockey, he was drafted 18th overall by the Colorado Avalanche — seven spots higher than his brother.

“I’m not the success story he is,” Anthony Stewart said. “People don’t give him enough credit for making it there and staying by going that route at a time when people thought he was better off playing football than hockey.”

AN EPIPHANY

That route was pockmarked by tragedy. In March 2007, before Chris turned pro, his mother died of a heart attack at age 52, putting more pressure on the Stewart brothers to provide sustainable financial security for their family.

NHL success proved fleeting for Anthony, who never established himself in Florida. His best season was 2010-11 when he scored 14 goals among 39 points for the Atlanta Thrashers.

He played one last season for the Carolina Hurricanes and finished his NHL career with 27 goals and 71 points in 262 games. Anthony knocked around Europe for four seasons before retiring in 2016.

“I was a guy who thought, ‘I’m a first-rounder who should be playing on the first line,’ but didn’t do the intangibles,” he said. “Chris came in Day 1 as a fighter in the OHL, and once he was in the door, he learned the right things. I was the skill guy who had to do physical things.

“Was it in me? Probably. But I didn’t have anyone who pulled me aside to show me, and when they did it was too late. Full credit to Chris for realizing he had it in him.”

Chris Stewart immediately flourished with the Avalanche, scoring a career-high 28 goals among 64 points his second season. In February 2011, Colorado traded him to St. Louis as part of a blockbuster swap of defensemen — former No. 1 overall pick Erik Johnson to the Blues for Avs’ prospect Kevin Shattenkirk.

In St. Louis, the gears did not mesh between the cocky Stewart and autocratic Blues coach Ken Hitchcock. His ice time and production diminished and after 3 1/2 seasons he was traded to Buffalo, where injuries slowed Stewart even more.

The Wild acquired him at the 2015 trade deadline to infuse toughness on a passive team. Stewart played well in their first-round playoff victory over his former Blues team. Minnesota tried to re-sign him but Stewart chose to play last season at Anaheim, a hidden blessing in that it united him with then-Ducks coach Bruce Boudreau.

“People listen to him and respect him,” said Boudreau, who has coached the Wild to first place in the Western Conference his first season in Minnesota.

“They know when he says something it’s an important thing. It’s not just walking the walk, he’s talking the talk — or whatever that saying is. He is all-in for the group. He protects players and will do whatever it takes to win.”

Loyalty cuts both ways in this symbiotic relationship between player and coach.

Stewart said he was in “no-man’s land” in late November, unable to score and unwilling to play physical. Boudreau called him on the carpet during a meeting to remind Stewart why he was here and to embrace the role in which he thrived in Anaheim.

“Bruce Boudreau has complete faith in Chris, and you can tell he’s comfortable doing everything the team is asking of him and more,” said Philadelphia Flyers all-star winger Wayne Simmonds, Stewart’s childhood friend from Toronto.

“Show him loyalty and he’ll show it right back.”

NEW FAMILIES

Anthony Stewart is finished playing hockey but remains immersed in the sport. The father of two young children is running a hockey school and coaching a triple-A team in Toronto.

The past is never far away.

“I drive by the East Side (Motel) at least once a week,” he said. “I hope that kids aren’t living there. I really hope they turn it into a parking lot.”

Anthony was circumspect when asked whether he had to reconcile his stalled career with Chris’ ascendance.

“It’s a business, right? I’m so proud of my brother’s success,” he said. “As a whole, the Stewart family is doing great. I can’t be bitter about the business. I called it quits at 31. Do I have regrets? Not really. I played over 200 games in the NHL.

“It’s great now to turn on the TV and see your brother doing really well, what he was capable of doing, the last four or five years. I’m sure he’s becoming a fan favorite in Minnesota. He’s got a huge cheering section in Toronto.”

Chris Stewart admits he’s had “a little bit of a weird career.” Early production lulled him into thinking he did not have to round out his game. Playing for several head coaches has allowed him to discover and embrace his true role.

He also is a married father of twin toddlers, Christian and Connor, who can snuff the stress and politics of wins, losses and ice time in their tracks.

“When you can come home now and turn your brain off, realize there’s something bigger than hockey going for you, that you can shape and mold their life and provide things for them you never had for yourself growing up, to hear the smiles and giggles, is definitely the best part of my day,” he said.

“My past definitely played a big part in finding me as a person and realizing where I am today. I definitely appreciate every blessing that I have in my life. I don’t take it for granted, being able to do things for my family and for my kids that never in a million years could I have had growing up.”