On Saturday the Canadiens will honour the force of nature that stood between the pipes and carried Montreal to titles in '86 and '93.
It's hard to look past the despicable actions of Patrick Roy and the on-ice debacle involving his son and the Quebec Ramparts junior hockey team he coached last season but this Saturday night might be a good time to start.
After all, the Canadiens are celebrating Patrick Roy the player, not the coach and Patrick Roy the player was one of the most remarkable goaltending talents ever to play in the National Hockey League.
He is more than that and if you take the measure of the man as well as the hockey player, it isn't all good. The Quebec incident in which he appeared to orchestrate a brawl and encourage his son to participate in it will forever be a stain on his legacy. His temperamental departure from Montreal falls under that category as do a few well-publicized off-ice incidents in Colorado where he played the second half of his unparalleled career.
Those incidents give some unwanted insight into his competitive nature, the very nature that made him -- for the time being at least -- the winningest goaltender in NHL history.
Yet it's worth nothing that Roy's temper isn't what you would classify as O.J. Simpson-like.
There is a fine line that a professional athlete walks in regards controlling that urge to excel at all costs and though Roy has crossed it at times on and off the ice his missteps aren't felonies and deserve to be kept in context with his many accomplishments.
The on-ice work speaks for itself.
I don't for a moment believe that success in sports is the be all and end all for a man or a woman, but that old truism about sports not building character but revealing it says a lot, especially about Roy.
Roy is a competitor extraordinaire. I saw it early in his career, when a still too-young man arrived in the Forum to wear the Bleu, Blanc et Rouge and was noteworthy for both his aggressive play and a rather odd habit of holding conversations with his goal posts.
I saw it every step of the way through that remarkable run of 10 overtime victories en route to the 1993 Stanley Cup championship. Roy was down two games to none to archrival Quebec when, stung by media criticism, he responded with four-straight wins against what was arguably the better team. I saw first-hand how he beat the Buffalo Sabres by a goal in every game of their second-round match-up. It wasn't a bad Buffalo team with Dale Hawerchuk, Pat LaFontaine and Alexander Mogilny (though injuries lessened their contributions almost nightly) in the lineup, but each time the Sabres made a run at the Canadiens, Roy stopped them cold.
"He stopped everything we could throw at him," said a dejected Hawerchuk. "He just wouldn't be denied."
That was one of the early chapters of a budding legacy, a legacy built not just on a wanting to win, but on a mindset that losing was simply not acceptable.
That was never more evident than that terrible night in December 1995 when Roy stormed to the bench in a one-sided loss, blew past head coach Mario Tremblay and informed team president Ronald Corey that he had played his last game in Montreal.
Did he walk out on his team? You could say that, but if you knew then just how passionate Roy was about winning and just how certain he was that Tremblay was attempting to humiliate him for reasons that had nothing to do with winning or team play you could argue that he was pushed out.
I make no excuses for the action and I would argue that Tremblay was not making it as personal as Roy believed but the result was inevitable. Humiliation, just like losing, was something Roy could never accept. For Tremblay and the Canadiens not to know that there would be some reaction to their action, well, that's the part that's unbelievable.
I saw that passion again the night Roy made one of the most famous miscues in NHL history, the night when, while attempting to embellish a save (a frequent Roy tactic designed to weaken the mindset of an opponent), Roy went Statue of Liberty with his glove only to drop the puck into his own net.
He was "putting a little mustard" on a good save, but it was a devastating miscue, one that gave the Detroit Red Wings new life and, eventually, the Stanley Cup.
The night of that Game 6 loss in Colorado, no one in media expected to see Patrick Roy. Yet he came to his locker, answered most every question with a steely gaze at the questioner and a rock-solid belief that he had done no wrong.
He talked about how he played to win and dismissed criticism of his miscue as if it didn't even happen.
"What goal," he asked when a questioner asked him to recount the circumstances. "Which one do you mean?"
It might have been a defensive mechanism, but I don't think so. Roy stood there with his backbone straight, his eyes locked on his inquisitor and with a determination that seemed wholly unimaginable in any other losing locker room.
Roy had made a mistake, but he wasn't going to allow his teammates to falter because of it. History says that they did, but it wasn't because Roy didn't try.
"I play to win," he said that evening. "Everything I do out there is with the goal of winning. That is the way I always play."
Patrick Roy didn't always win, but right up until his last game he never stopped trying.
Say what you will about the other aspects of his life and I've said plenty about the incident with the Remparts and some of his off-ice mistakes, but overall the Patrick Roy I will always remember is the one who played to win, every night, in every circumstance, no matter what the odds.
He has his failings as a man, a coach and, one could even argue, as a father, but on Saturday night in the Bell Centre he will be honoured as a hockey player and both he, the Canadiens and their fans deserves that.
In that regard, his actions, along with his records, speak for themselves.
Office? Well, there is some good there as well.
The Patrick Roy I first came to know in the NHL.
