BELLEVILLE - If your introduction to P.K. Subban came at the 2007 NHL entry draft, you know that he sometimes lets his exuberance get the better of him.

Just minutes after the Montreal Canadiens selected him in the second round and he donned the C-H for the first time, he told the assembled media his short-term goals.

"I’m going to camp with the idea of making the Canadiens and helping them win the Stanley Cup," he told them with a straight face and a smile, which is for him the same thing.

If your introduction to Subban came at the world juniors last season, you saw the smile and likely heard his voice but saw nothing that justified that Canadiens’ pick or, for that matter, his place on the Canadian roster. He was along for the ride, had a good seat, got along with his teammates and stood on the blue line singing the national anthem.

Ice time was for the other blue liners, including a couple who were drafted ahead of him in 2007 (Karl Alzner and Thomas Hickey) and two who soon would be entering the draft themselves (Drew Doughty and Luke Schenn).

I caught up Subban on Saturday night.

For the second autumn in the row he hasn’t cracked the Canadiens roster out of training camp and he has arrived back in Belleville to resume his duties with the Bulls of the Ontario Hockey League. In his first game back with them he picked up an assist on a power-play goal and ended up plus-1. He logged at least 30 minutes in the Bulls’ 2-1 win over the Guelph Storm at the Yardman Arena. He was almost too tired to talk after the game.

Almost.

"Nothing short of a championship," he said when I asked him what he hoped to come away with this season. "Just a championship."

For Subban, this is thinking small. Experience must have chastened him - otherwise he’d be expressing his intent to win a Memorial Cup and then get called up to the Canadiens to play in the Stanley Cup final.

Lest you think that his is an ego run amok or a teen with a vivid imagination, know that you can base your estimation of Subban based on quotes and the image of him as a spare part on the Canadian under-20s.

He’s a talent. He also might be as entertaining a junior player as you’ll see in a given season. Not the best. Still a work in progress. But entertaining – it’s plain to even a casual spectator that few players have as much fun on the ice. And barring anything unforeseen and if there’s justice in this world, Subban will get a regular shift if not a starring role at the under-20s in Ottawa when the holidays roll around.

A lot of juniors have to do more when they go to the next level, but for Subban it will be doing less. That’s even the case with the world juniors.

Subban has never seen a forechecker that he doesn’t think he can dance by, hasn’t seen a rush he shouldn’t jump into. He has the folks in Belleville hold their breath, including his coach George Burnett.

"That’s P.K. being P.K.," Burnett says.

Sometimes it turns on the red light, most often in the opposing team’s end, though sometimes in his own.

That’s entertainment.

On Saturday night, with the Bulls killing a penalty and up a goal, Subban ragged the puck in his own end, keeping his body between the puck and a young Guelph Storm forward who chased him in vain like a school kid playing shinny with the grownups. He turned and cut back, zig-zagging three times and then a fourth for the fans cheering as the penalty time wound down. He did everything but wave to his friends in the crowd.

That’s just business as usual for Subban; a fairly representative sequence. He has seen enough junior hockey to know when he can take advantage of an over-matched opponent, when he’s on against a 16-year-old third or fourth-liner. Carrying the puck he can sense when he can take advantage of the extra acreage on the Olympic-sized pad at Yardmen Arena in Belleville.

It’s not news to Subban that there are no 16-year-olds in the NHL and all the rinks there are only 80-feet wide. He knows that he’ll have to change his game if he’s going to make good on his vow to lead Montreal to a Stanley Cup (somewhat later than originally promised). He has been to a couple of pro camps, so he knows he can’t try to toy with anyone at a level where everyone can play and someone can knock your helmet to the ice with your head still attached. He’ll have to dial down the personality. He has figured that out.

"It’s a different game there," he said after the win over Guelph.

For some prospects, junior hockey is an exact dress rehearsal for the NHL: same roles on the ice only in miniature. As you probably have guessed that’s not the story here. Yes, it’s his apprenticeship for the pros, but he still wants to do everything he can to give his team its best chance to win. If that means playing a riskier game, he’s good with that.

Subban takes an obvious joy in playing the game and at this point "play" is the key word. "His teammates feed off that," Burnett says.

In the NHL there is always a yellow light ready to turn to a red, but with the Bulls it’s a green, sometimes even a flashing green.

Subban was able to dial down the personality in Belleville’s run to an Eastern Conference championship and a Memorial Cup berth last spring. The best chance you’ll have to get a sense of what he can do as a pro will come at the world juniors in Ottawa over the holidays.

A lot of other top prospects on the pro-sized rink with one-and-done pressure.

He’ll know he’s not in Belleville anymore. He’ll have to perform rather than just play.

Subban has to be disappointed about his limited role with the world junior team last season, or at least more disappointed than he lets on, which is not at all.

"P.K. doesn’t have too many bad days and when he does it’s hard to tell," Burnett says.

Subban is taking nothing for granted in advance of the selection for the world junior tryouts — one of those rare occasions that he goes at something cautiously.

"Just because I was there last year means nothing this season," he says. "I have to play to the best of my ability and earn a place on the team."

This hardly sounds like the kid who told the reporters to pencil him into the Canadiens’ lineup or the one who told his Belleville coach he was making the team.

A couple of things suggest he can make a significant contribution at the U-20s and find a role for himself in the NHL.

No. 1: He’d be in the 90th percentile when it comes to skating, maybe even better. The Olympic rink in Belleville offers him more room to wheel and deal, but it also stretches any defenceman in retreat — it’s one thing to stop a winger going wide, another to stop him with 10 extra feet to operate on each side. It forced Subban out of a common poor blue-line habit: reaching for the puck rather than moving his feet.

No. 2: He’s a right-handed shot on the point. Not quite as rare as a total eclipse of the sun but still a valued commodity, especially when it’s combined with some legit puck-handling skill and a shot that’s as hard as any in the OHL.

Pernell Karl Subban has an interesting backgorund: His father is a middle-school principal and Habs fan from Jamaica, while his mother is from an even less likely hotbed of hockey, the Caribbean island of Montserrat.

Belleville made him a sixth-round pick in the OHL draft but he played his way onto the team like a first-rounder — and just as he told Burnett he would when he arrived in Belleville: with confidence.

He’s studying anatomy and physiology at Loyalist College, knowing that his body is, if everything turns out right, his ticket moving forward. Before he took a class there though, he realized that being shy of six feet and walking around at 195 or 200 pounds, he’ll never fit the profile of a stay-at-home defenceman. He’s a naturally personable, socially adept kid — Burnett coaches him on the ice but doesn’t worry for a second about any maintenance off of it.

You could get lost in the back-story and the bold pronouncements and miss the game he plays. There might not be anyone more fun to watch and there’s nobody who has more fun doing it.

Stuff that fell out of my notebook... On its face it looked like Sudbury fans and Wolves coach/GM Mike Foligno were burned by Columbus’ decision to send their 2008 first-rounder Nikita Filatov to Syracuse of the AHL rather than to the OHL. Filatov was a first overall pick in the CHL import draft and many believe him to be the best Euro to land in major junior in a long time. When Foligno made that pick he had to have the Blue Jackets’ word they’d assign Filatov to Sudbury if he didn’t make the big club. As it turns out, according to the Sudbury Star, all is not well with the Wolves. Filatov is a pretty comparable talent to Columbus’ 2007 first-round Jakub Voracek. In fact Voracek was probably closer than Filatov to deserving a spot on the roster as an 18-year-old. Still, Voracek has benefited from another season in Halifax. Yes, the rules on call-ups are different but development is development, no matter how you slice it ... Guelph Storm goalie Thomas McCollum, the Red Wings’ first-rounder back in June, gave away the winning goal Saturday night. It ended being credited to Tyler Randell, unassisted. Truth is, the one assist should go to McCollum, who tried to handle the puck behind the net and lost it — he didn’t know it was down between his blades when he skated back to his crease. It was like one of those socially painful situations when, after powdering your nose, you return to the dining room with ... I love the Belleville rink and the giant Bulls head at the one end of the rink. They have a pretty knowledgeable fan base too. The one downside: The lamest mascot in junior hockey. Not the bull but some guy, presumably as part of a sentencing agreement, dressed up as a Holstein cow (not exactly as pictured). When I saw the mascot lying down during intermission, I regretted not bringing my umbrella ... A follow-up to the Russians in the O story: Windsor has landed Andrei Loktionov and he looks to be as good as promised. Now if only the Islanders can come to their senses and send Josh Bailey back to the Spitfires. Normally I’d say this is a fat-chance proposition (the part about the Islanders coming to their senses) but this story in the Long Island press makes it sound like there’s a good shot that this is just a nine-game trial ... In other Russian news, London finally got Sergei Korostin.

Gare Joyce will be writing on junior hockey for Sportsnet.ca this season. A veteran journalist, Joyce is the author of Future Greats and Heartbreaks: A Year Undercover in the Secret World of NHL Scouts, When the Lights Went Out: How One Brawl Ended Hockey's Cold War and Changed the Game and Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm. He also writes for ESPN The Magazine, espn.com and several Canadian magazines.