opinion

Former Montreal Canadiens goalie Ken Dryden fields questions at a news conference, in Montreal on Sept. 20, 2006.

Every sport needs its athlete-poet. Now that Ken Dryden is gone, where is hockey’s?

Dryden was a great player on what was probably the greatest team of all time, and that was the least of it. Via his landmark autobiography and many subsequent writings, he was the game’s conscience, its sharpest interrogator and its interior monologue.

It’s difficult for someone who is very good at something to explain to someone who isn’t how they do the thing they do. Dryden spent decades trying.

Here he is, in a frequently quoted passage from ‘The Game’, on how he does his job:

“My conscious mind goes blank. I feel nothing, I hear nothing, my eyes watch the puck, my body moves–

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