A lifetime in hockey culminates, the Stanley Cup is on the ice and being shared by players and their families, babies to grandparents, in a scene of chaotic jubilation and happiness. A few people are crying.

As they stood at the top of the mountain Tuesday, with nowhere higher to climb, Stanley Cup champions for the first time after the Vegas Golden Knights beat the Florida Panthers 9-3, team president George McPhee and general manager Kelly McCrimmon surveyed the celebration and thought for a moment about who was not there on the ice with them at T-Mobile Arena.

McPhee is 64 years old, McCrimmon 62. They’ve lived, and seen things in hockey and beyond. They understand challenge and loss.

In the greatest moment of his hockey life, McCrimmon couldn’t help but think of his brother, Brad, a Stanley Cup winner as a defenceman with the Calgary Flames in 1989 who was building a career as a coach when he died in a 2011 plane crash with his Lokomotiv Yaroslavl players in Russia.

For McPhee, who hired McCrimmon in 2016 to help build a National Hockey League expansion team in the Las Vegas desert, the person he thought of was Pat Quinn. Quinn, who long before he coached the Toronto Maple Leafs to the last thing resembling playoff success, hired McPhee out of law school in 1992 to help manage the Vancouver Canucks. Quinn died of cancer in 2014. McPhee wept at his funeral in North Vancouver.

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