from Bruce Arthur of the Toronto Star,
Brendan Shanahan is comfortable with words, but he can’t figure out how to describe how he feels, one day before the season begins. It’s not nervous, precisely. Interested? No, much stronger than that. He hits one. “Alive,” he says in his office at the MasterCard practice facility, which overlooks the ice. “I’m struggling to find it, but it’s like the feeling I used to have before a season. It’s a mixture of excitement, fear, adrenaline.” Alive.
It took a long time for Shanahan to circle back to the beginning, but here he is. When he was a boy in the Toronto suburb of Mimico, the youngest of four brothers, he would run with his older siblings through the same streets he drives now when he comes to practice. He left at 16 to play junior in London; he was, to his great surprise, in the NHL at age 18. He played his second ever NHL game here, a Leafs home opener. He returned to his high school’s dance the night before.
“It was completely natural to go,” Shanahan says. “My friends were still in high school. It wasn’t dumb to go. What was dumb was to tell one of my teammates where I was going.”
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