from Kevin Paul Dupont of the Boston Glob,

NHL role models were few to nonexistent when Dmitry Orlov, now 31, was growing up in Siberia. He was born and raised some 2,200 miles east of Moscow, in the days when it wasn’t routine for the best league in the world to have its games beamed to all corners of the planet.

Dreams, like TV, were different then. It was the world before dial-up jokes were invented....

Hockey fans in Orlov’s hometown of Novokuznetsk in the early ’90s, he noted, focused mainly on the World Championship and Olympics. The big sheets of international play were hockey’s showcase events. Infrequent glimpses of the NHL came in televised highlight packages.

“So if I was comparing my game to someone,” Orlov recalled, “it was like, you know ... I had no one, really ... I didn’t have NHL idols. I was only comparing to myself all the time, that was it.”

The Red Wings and their so-called Russian Five began to change all that in the mid ’90s. Russian kids, noted Orlov, were able to find a North American foothold, a focal point, in star countrymen Sergei Fedorov, Slava Kozlov, Igor Larionov, Vladimir Konstantinov, and Slava Fetisov, the latter of whom was the star Russian defenseman who finally made his way to the NHL at the end of the ‘80s to sign with New Jersey.

For a couple of seasons, in the thick of the Red Wings’ glorious resurgence, legendary coach Scotty Bowman often rolled out the Russian Five as a unit. They were together in 1996-97 when the Wings won the first of back-to-back Stanley Cups. It was a few years later, said Orlov, when he finally saw the Russian Five play, albeit by watching some of their games on VHS cassette tapes.

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