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Graham made a Saskatoon franchise pitch to the NHL half a decade ago. He still believes it’s possible. The puck’s rolling slowly, and not many people think he’ll pull it off, but he figures it’s important to maintain even the tiniest bit of momentum.

“If you want to succeed in life, you’ve got to keep knocking on the door,” says Graham, who fronts On Ice Management Group.

“(The NHL) obviously knows about us, because they have to schedule officials, and I’ll bug (deputy commissioner Bill) Daly every now and then. But there’s no point pitching at the moment. What we have to do is keep being strong, building, showing success. In five years, if you’re over two million people in Saskatchewan, maybe somebody that’s in trouble will look this way. That’s no different than what Winnipeg did.”

In the meantime, Graham has a lot going on.

The Pirelli World Challenge is a North American racing series in several different classifications. President and CEO Greg Gill kicked Saskatoon’s tires this week, arriving in the city Monday and making a quick tour Tuesday.

It was, stresses Graham, very preliminary.

“It was an introduction,” he says. “You know me — I’m the guy who believes it’s an NHL town.

“It was them stopping en route to somewhere else, and me saying ‘If you’re going to look there, you might as well look here.’ ”

Graham carries deep auto-racing connections. In 2000, he drove on the first all-Canadian team to win a class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and he’s competed in everything from the infamous Paris to Dakar rally, to the NASCAR Nationwide series.

Graham has also worked as a racing promoter. In 1990, while wearing both hats at the Moosehead Grand Prix in Halifax, he stopped his own race car to pull unconscious fellow driver Ron Fellows out of his vehicle after a ball-of-flames crash.