from Dave Stubbs of NHL.com,

Scotty Bowman remembers the tear gas and the ensuing chaos in the acrid smoke, his struggle to get down the cement steps from the Montreal Forum's standing-room area to the apparent safety of the auxiliary dressing rooms.

"And then Dick pulled me into the Montreal Canadiens dressing room for 10 minutes before I got out the back door to my car," Bowman said. "We had no idea what would be going on outside."

The friendship of Bowman, the winningest coach in NHL history, and Dick Irvin Jr., the iconic, retired television and radio voice of the Canadiens, dates to the 1950s.

This rich, happy relationship is a riot, literally and figuratively.

Hockey Night in Canada's Dick Irvin Jr. interviews coach Scotty Bowman on May 21, 1979 following the Montreal Canadiens' fourth consecutive Stanley Cup championship. It was Bowman's fifth and final Cup with Montreal.

Their paths had crossed before March 17, 1955 -- neither remembers those details -- but their bond formed that night, amid the infamous Richard Riot sparked by the suspension the day before of Canadiens legend Maurice "Rocket" Richard by NHL president Clarence Campbell.

During a two-hour lunch Saturday in the suburbs of Montreal, over Bowman's salad and Irvin's grilled cheese sandwich, two old friends who hadn't seen each other in perhaps a decade finished one another's sentences, adding detail and frills to their tales while bouncing between decades to recall moments of two remarkable lives in and beyond hockey.

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