Game 7 provides the ultimate stage for what will be an emotional conclusion for the Canucks and B's.
VANCOUVER -- "You want it so bad," Rod Brind'Amour was saying, his scarred, ageing face a hockey highway map with lines from Wilcox, Saskatchewan all the way to Raleigh, North Carolina.
It was the day before Game 7 of the 2006 Stanley Cup final, and Brind'Amour, who'd battled and clawed through 20 NHL seasons without ever getting his hands on the ultimate prize -- was trying to put into words exactly what, and who, he kept lacin' ‘em up for.
"Not just for yourself, but for the guy sitting beside you," he said. "Your dad. Your kids. There are so many people you're thinking about who are pulling for you. It's exhausting."
For the Sedin twins, their thoughts will go to their father Tommy and mother Tora; Thomas Gradin -- the Canucks scout whom Tommy Sedin knew long before Daniel and Henrik were even born -- and former Canucks GM Brian Burke, whose draft day wizardry back in 1999 made any of this possible.
(A feat we're still waiting for someone in this Canucks organization to acknowledge, just once.)
If you're lucky, you get one of these in your lifetime. If you're Mark Recchi, Wednesday's game at Rogers Arena will be his 11th Game 7. Patrick Roy and Scott Stevens each played in 13.
"We're going to go up there," Recchi said of Vancouver, "and we're going to lay it on the line like they are. We've got to find a way to win a game to win a Stanley Cup. We're going to do whatever we can."
Recchi has twice won the Cup -- 1991 with Pittsburgh and in 2006 alongside Brind'Amour -- and at age 43 has promised to retire if Boston wins on Wednesday.
Dave Andreychuk wasn't so rich. In 2004, when the Tampa Bay Lightning won Game 6 in Calgary to bring the series back home for one final game, he was at the end.
Through 23 seasons, he would play 1,801 games for six different teams, yet never drank from the Stanley Cup. That game on that night was Andreychuk's last chance, and he knew it.
"I have been trying to stay composed through the whole thing," he said the day before Game 7 versus the Flames. "Deep down inside there's a lot of emotion. Everybody associated with me ... the wins, and the losses, and the overtimes.
"I have dreamed about being in this situation. I have a chance to win one more game to win the Stanley Cup. Seems like it's a long time ago when I started, and it's taken a while to get here. But I finally have my chance."
What could a Game 7 dressing room possibly be like?
"If you're not here," Detroit goalie Chris Osgood told us a few years later, "you don't know what it's like."
We are "here" now, with the Boston Bruins and Vancouver Canucks having taken this most unique final the distance. It is that moment where summer will begin for everyone, as Henrik Sedin has referenced a few times during this run, the moment the final siren sounds -- or spare our hearts, the last puck crosses the goal line in Game 7 OT.
There is an equality to it; a realization that it doesn't matter anymore who was favoured, who had a 2-0 series lead, or who won how many games in which building. Home teams win more of these Game 7s, to be sure, but tell that to the Detroit Red Wings of 2009, who watched Pittsburgh carry the Cup around Joe Louis Arena.
And you'll know that it doesn't matter what happened in Game 6, if you recall Edmonton smoking Carolina 4-0 on a night the Oilers could well have scored eight at Rexall Place.
"We've got ourselves to a level now where our best will be good enough," Ethan Moreau said after that game. "It's a pretty good feeling going into a big game, that if we play well, we'll win."
The next time we spoke with Moreau, he had tears in his eyes. He could barely utter his thoughts.
"It's all the sacrifices people make so you can get to this point," said Sidney Crosby, moments after accepting the Cup from Gary Bettman in ‘09. "My parents. The coaches you have along the way. People who influenced you."
It's hard to tell, after being on the ice with the winners and in the room with the losers a few times now, which end is more emotional. Jarome Iginla, Game 7 loser in '04 to Andreychuk, still tells this story about the post-game Flames dressing room:
"We'd hear different cheers, and it was so quiet in our room, you knew it was someone else holding up the Stanley Cup. You had to think of who it was.
"That was by far the lowest moment (of his career), but it just makes you so hungry," Iginla said. "Being that close, you're just dying to get back there and win it. I just can imagine how great that will feel."
You want to be telling the story from Andreychuk and Crosby's side, of course, rather than Moreau and Iginla.
But the greatest thing about this Game 7 -- the first one played on Canadian soil since Philly-Edmonton in 1987 -- is that every one of these players will give it every ounce on every shift.
When you get a chance to play in one of these games, hockey players are duty bound. It is just understood.
"We left it all out there," losing Edmonton Oilers centre Shawn Horcoff said that night in Raleigh. "It was an honour."
