The Kid and Cole Harbour

Today the famous Crosby family dryer is in a storage unit, belatedly protected by layers of bubble wrap, kept in the dark under lock and key.

It’s been unseen for years, after the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame closed during the pandemic. The museum’s prized exhibit, which a young Sidney Crosby dented and dinged while practicing his shot in the basement of the modest, tidy Cole Harbour home where his parents still live, should re-emerge this summer, when a massive renovation is finally complete.

The dryer will be unwrapped and pushed into its place in the literal heart of the newly built hall, part of the Scotiabank Centre, home of the Halifax Mooseheads and other hopefuls. It will be backstopped by a curved sheet of hockey glass and surrounded by towers of pucks, like the beads of an abacus — one for each NHL goal he’s scored, 649 and counting.

The pucks are waiting in cardboard boxes, already stacked in place.

The dryer, for now, remains locked away.

Bruce Rainnie, the hall’s president, remembers a different time, when a steady parade of tourists would disembark from cruise ships and make the long walk up the hills of Halifax to stand in front of a battered home appliance.

“It was like a pilgrimage to Mecca,” he said. “You’d see people coming up in their Pittsburgh jerseys with No. 87 on them, with their cameras, to get their picture beside the dryer. I’m talking thousands of people. It was incredible.”

A blue plaque was mounted above the dryer, as though it were another of Halifax’s historic sites. “It would be surprising if another dryer of equal notoriety even existed,” the plaque read, just in case anyone might have debated where it ranked among notorious dryers.

A second sign requested that visitors not touch or open this one. A plastic shield eventually went in front of it, because too many of Crosby’s admirers couldn’t resist running their fingers over it, as though its pockmarks and puck scuffs contained a secret message, hidden lessons in greatness and how it begins.

There was still so much mystery about him then, his hockey more promise than fact.

The new exhibit will tell a fuller story, his career’s accounting nearly complete. Sid the Kid is now 38 years old, the ninth-oldest player in the NHL. He’s about to captain Canada at his third Winter Olympics. 

It will probably be his last.

“Honestly, I hope it’s not,” Crosby said in an exclusive interview with CBC Sports. “But if it is, I hope I can make the most of this great opportunity.”

Imagine if he does. Imagine if he plays the game of his life to win gold in Milano Cortina.

The pilgrims who visit his dryer will no longer need to wonder what’s possible for Sidney Crosby.

They’ll remember how impossible what he did was.

***

Cole Harbour sounds like it should be another postcard Maritime village, perched on cliffs above the sea with brightly painted houses and boats tied up to docks.

It is not. It is a small, scrappy town with as many churches as stoplights. It doesn’t have its own mayor because officially it’s part of Halifax, but no one from Cole Harbour says they’re from Halifax, or even neighbouring Dartmouth. They’re from Cole Harbour, an otherwise unremarkable place except for where it is in the world and the people it produces.

“I credit Sid with that,” Paul Mason said.

He started coaching Crosby when he was 10 years old and played for the Cole Harbour Wings. Back then, Mason would tell people he was from Dartmouth. “Then Sid left, and he kept saying he was from Cole Harbour. I thought, Why don’t I ever say that?”

In 2023, the Penguins played the Ottawa Senators in a preseason game in Halifax. Crosby made sure his team practiced at Cole Harbour Place, his town arena — and library, gym, and pool. They skated under twin matching banners, recognizing the two great hockey talents, Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon, groomed on this ice.

“I’m proud of my home,” Crosby said at the time, “what it has to offer and the people here.”

In any other small town, MacKinnon would be the celebrated one: a Stanley Cup champion, a Hart Trophy winner, and arguably the best player in hockey.

In Cole Harbour, Canada’s unlikeliest hockey capital, he’s the second one, the next one, the other one.

Upstairs at the rink, there are two trophy cases, one for each local hero. Crosby’s has more fingerprints on the glass. It’s also more carefully curated, more conspicuously alarmed. The entirety of Crosby’s life is on display, from the tiny Montreal Canadiens track suit he wore as a toddler to his Canada sweater and a picture of his three Stanley Cup rings.

“You could always see that he was special,” Mason said.

He’s still coaching, his 47^th season, and in December he took his current team of youngsters to Pittsburgh to see Crosby play the San Jose Sharks.

Mason had arranged for his boys to visit with Crosby in the locker room after, but the Penguins blew a four-goal lead in the third period and lost in overtime. He assumed the visit was off and was coming up with a different plan when his phone chimed with a text from Crosby: You ready to come down?

After Mason returned home, he went to the rink and stood in front of the trophy cabinet again. “I just took a peek,” he said. He thought about the boy he coached, and the man he’s become.

“I don’t look at the accomplishments,” Mason said. “I think of his character.”

There’s a solid argument to be made whether Crosby loves hockey so much because he’s good at it, or whether he’s good at it because he loves it so much. It’s a solid argument because it doesn’t have an easy answer; the answer is probably equal measures of both.

But if you stand in front of that cabinet and follow Sidney Crosby’s career back far enough in time and space, all the way back to his boyhood in Cole Harbour, an undeniable truth surfaces, like young talent on the ice.

Love came first.

***

It’s hard not to feel that everything that came after was somehow inevitable as well as impossible — as though each one of those pucks, waiting in those cardboard boxes, was always going to find its way into the net.

Most memorably, there was his Golden Goal in overtime against the U.S. to lift Canada to the top of the podium in Vancouver in 2010.

“These golden games have their crowning moment,” play-by-play man Chris Cuthbert shouted over the sound of the surging crowd. “And why wouldn’t it be Sidney Crosby?”

Mason was first told to scout Crosby when he was five. Rainnie, a local broadcasting legend, interviewed him when he was eight, scoring at will against kids two years older. The Penguins won the draft lottery in 2005 and there was never any doubt who they would pick. Crosby arrived in the NHL as an 18-year-old, after a game-changing lockout, expected only to save hockey itself.

Of course, when Canada needed its own saviour, it was going to be him. 

***

But Crosby was more than anointed. He has earned and re-earned his blessings.

Every summer, He returns to Cole Harbour, or near enough, to his big house on the lake by the airport.

He meets up with MacKinnon and Brad Marchand, another Haligonian, and together they drive to the Greenfoot Energy Centre in Bedford. The beer leagues and figure skating lessons make way for three future Hall of Famers, paced by Brad Crossley, who coached the Dartmouth Subways to a national title game when Crosby was 14.

Twenty-four years later — three Stanley Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and every met expectation later — and Crosby still skates, all summer long.

He hates running, but he still runs, too, huffing his way through beach sand or up the Citadel hill, the way he did when he was a kid.

“It’s a strange way he dominates,” Rainnie said. “He’s relentless.”

Crosby’s greatness is obvious; it is also oddly unassuming. He is not the best at any single aspect of the game, except leadership. MacKinnon is a more explosive skater; Alex Ovechkin has a harder shot; Connor McDavid is a superior playmaker; Auston Matthews is better at faceoffs.

But nobody outworks him. Crosby has a huge ass, his return on decades of investment, and his legs, even at 38, are invariably compared to tree trunks. The unseen parts of him separate him, and he has maintained them like an engine.

“It takes a lot more than it used to,” he said. “It all comes down to having passion for it and trying to be the best that you can be. I still love it. I think that’s probably the biggest part of it.”

Love might have come first.

Love, he has learned, also requires attention. 

***

It was long past dark, on the Saturday before Christmas, when visitors passed the famous sign that welcomes them to Cole Harbour — HOME OF SIDNEY CROSBY — at the corner by the Walmart, next to a mobile billboard offering cash for gold.

They pulled into the parking lot in front of Big Leagues, the local sports bar.

That night, Crosby’s Penguins were in Montreal to play the Canadiens; he needed two points to break Mario Lemieux’s franchise record against the team he grew up loving. His parents, Troy and Trina, were there to watch him. So was Kathy Leutner, his long-time girlfriend. Brad Crossley had made the trip, too.

“He was mad I bought my own ticket,’ Crossley said. 

Inside Big Leagues, however, there wasn’t the same sense of occasion, or anticipation.

When Crosby was still a kid, he was a kind of musician. Trina used to talk about how her son’s basement sessions became “background noise” in her family’s daily life. The dryer sounded like a kick drum whenever it suffered another blow. A nearby support post made a telltale ting.

He grew up to become more of a conductor than a member of the orchestra. There have been unforgettable nights when Crosby’s hands have made Cole Harbour’s streets silent and its living rooms into concert halls.

This wouldn’t be one of them.

Two of Crosby’s jerseys hung framed on the wall, but of the dozens of TVs, only two were tuned into his potentially historic game.

A band played in the corner, grinding through a cover of “New Orleans is Sinking.” An older man asked to watch the Bruins play the Canucks instead. Another four-top of young men protested when the TV nearest to them was switched from the NFL game between the Eagles and Commanders; the screen was hastily returned to the football.

It’s too much to say that Crosby’s status has diminished here. “Cole Harbour is unbelievably proud of him,” Paul Mason said. In the 2023 obituary of a teacher named Annette Garner, it notes, among the many other accomplishments of her well-lived life, that “she had the pleasure of teaching Sidney Crosby” at Colby Village Elementary.

But maybe he’s a little underappreciated just now, his artistry routine, his genius expected. Our collective memory has been thinned by time and circumstance, like the vanished parades of former pilgrims, given less reason to bear witness.

The Penguins haven’t made the playoffs since 2022; they last won a post-season series in 2018. Crosby hasn’t played at an Olympics since 2014. The Golden Goal was nearly 16 years ago. There are kids headed to junior who were born after it.

The game that night against Montreal was, in every sense, more of the same.

With the Canadiens already ahead 2-0 midway through the second period, Josh Anderson scored short-handed, Crosby giving chase, almost symbolically, unable to catch him.

The Penguins eventually lost their eighth in a row, 4-0.

Jacob Fowler, Montreal’s 21-year-old goalie, wasn’t even aware that he’d stopped history from being made with his first career shutout.

“I didn’t know that,” Fowler said after.

No one at Big Leagues seemed to be paying attention, either.

The band ripped into “Cuts Like a Knife.” The Packers and Bears went into overtime. And the 1,386^th game of Crosby’s NHL career had been reduced to background noise, like his assaults on the family dryer, a former fascination now too familiar to register.

***

Sometimes, if you’re from a small town, you need to leave home to come back to it. Before you go, you’re the competition for the same few, limited resources, opportunities most of all. After, you become the inspiration, the proof that dreams are worth dreaming. Distance changes the view of you.

After Crosby finished at Colby Village Elementary — where an autographed picture of him still hangs in the office — he attended Astral Drive Junior High School. His burgeoning reputation followed him into the halls, and the teenage whispers that came with it weren’t always kind.

He went to high school in Minnesota in part to play better hockey. He also needed a little distance. Today, the only photograph of Crosby at Astral Drive  is his graduation photo. He is smiling in it, but he hasn’t come back to autograph it.

The day after Crosby’s quiet game against Montreal, the Canadiens flew to Pittsburgh. His parents and girlfriend did, too. 

Maybe the home crowd, its regard and admiration, was the difference. He scored at 7:58 of the first period. He added an assist, his 1,079^th, less than five minutes later, giving him 1,724 career points. He passed Lemieux and became the NHL’s eighth-leading scorer of all time, and the Penguins ended their losing streak, winning in a shootout, 4-3.

He looked embarrassed by the ovation he received, but Pittsburgh pays its debts. 

He was, after a little too long away, back at the centre of things.

***

“It’s really special,” Crosby said after. “You’re trying to stay in the game but also just trying to enjoy the moment, too. It’s hard to balance that sometimes, especially as you get older. You tend to look at things a little bit differently.”

It came up a lot, on his record-breaking night, that Crosby had lived with Lemieux and his family when he first came to Pittsburgh. Their relationship went beyond hockey and its confines. Lemieux had given Crosby a seat at his kitchen table.

They combined for only 26 games before Lemieux was forced to hang up his skates, his heart broken, his own love for the game first lessened, then lost. 

Crosby was in the room when Lemieux announced his retirement in January 2006.

“This is it,” Lemieux said, fighting back tears. “It hurts.”

Crosby already knew well enough how greatness begins, and what it comes to demand.

Lemieux taught him something more important.

Watching Lemieux’s sad departure, Crosby saw first-hand, through his 18-year-old eyes, how greatness almost always ends: unwillingly, with a fight. 

***

It’s telling what he first remembers when he’s asked about his Golden Goal. He remembers the feeling that came before it, after the U.S. scored to tie the game with 25 seconds left in regulation.

“The devastation,” he said. “That feeling will stick with me, when you’re that close.”

And then he remembers the resolve in the Canadian locker room during the stomach-sick intermission, in the minutes before he went out and turned potential heartbreak into glorious history.

He can still hear what head coach Mike Babcock said in that otherwise silent room: “Someone’s got an opportunity here to score a goal and be a hero.”

“I remember there was a switch,” Crosby said.

During February’s 4 Nations Face-Off, the best-on-best dress rehearsal for the Olympics, he was reminded, as if he’d ever forgotten, what hockey can still mean to him, and what he can mean to us. 

Because of Crosby’s off-ice kindness and reserve, his competitiveness, his pride — his venom — are a little underappreciated, too.

MacKinnon has often told the story that, shortly after he was drafted by the Avalanche, he went for one of his first beach workouts with Crosby. They finished with ten sprints up a dune. Crosby won the first nine. MacKinnon took the lead in the tenth. That was before Crosby put a hand around MacKinnon’s ankle, dragged him down to the bottom of the dune, and sprinted past him.

“It’s almost like a Superman suit,” Mason said. “When he’s competing, it’s on. When it comes off, he’s Clark Kent, the nicest person you’re going to meet. But he absolutely hates to lose. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing golf or washer toss. If he loses, he wants to go again.”

Crosby knows, when he muscles through his runs, when his blades cut deep into the ice, that there remains one uncontestable way for him to forestall aging and its insults, to reassert his place on the TVs at Big Leagues and in the national conversation.

Never mind his 649 goals, or however many more he might score, or his rank on the career points list, or who’s better at him at what, or what he can and can’t do as well as he once did.

He and Drew Doughty have a chance to become the first three-time gold medallists in the history of Canadian men’s hockey.

Three Stanley Cups and three Olympic gold medals will make him the best team player who’s ever lived.

***

Crosby will be the last to say so.

“I’m a long ways away from that,” he said. “A lot of work to be done before I even want to talk about the potential of that.”

His deflection of praise, his reluctance to draw attention to himself, is partly a product of his upbringing in that modest, tidy home, surrounded by other modest, tidy homes, nobody better or different than anybody else, no matter how good you are.

It’s also a product of this place.

Ken Dryden and Roy MacGregor, in their book Home Game, saw in hockey “our struggle to survive and civilize winter.”

That’s why weekends in Cole Harbour revolve around its many churches and its only arena. They perform the same function in different ways. They’re places to come together, inside, out of the cold and dark. Their rhythms and rituals are shelter from the perils of the outside world. 

There’s a stone beach in Lawrencetown, a short drive from the arena, a narrow road wending its way through stands of birches, clinging to life on the rocks. It’s a bracing spot to visit in the winter especially. The knife-grey North Atlantic crashes against the stones, the sun turned abstract by the low sky, the wind threatening to carry a few brave kite surfers into oblivion. 

Sometimes our fates are defined by inches, an opening the size of a banged-up dryer door, a window the width of a puck.

Obsessives like Crosby first learn how much those inches might mean — to themselves, to their community, to their team, to their country — and next they become pathological about them, fighting to control what they can through practice and discipline.

But even for the most determined among us, even for the most gifted and deserving, sometimes something much grander decides our destiny. A lot gets drawn. The game breaks a certain way. The moon pulls the ocean, and the ocean pulls us.

There’s a sign at that beach in Lawrencetown, a warning posted by people who understand the natural order of things. “If caught, don’t fight the current,” it reads. “If you cannot escape, float or tread water.”

It’s hard to feel big standing on that beach, on the beaches where Crosby still runs every summer.

***

Bruce Rainnie believes that Crosby has two competing forces within him, two polar feelings engaged in an endless war.

There is a part of him that’s supremely self-confident, his eminence a muscle memory.

There is another that feels unaccomplished, as though he hasn’t fulfilled the ambition that he has for himself, not yet.

“If you can have those two things co-exist, and you can manage those conversations, you become great,” Rainnie said. “I firmly believe that.”

In Cole Harbour, the ocean and its whims are a constant presence, like a giant looming over your shoulders. That’s doubt. That’s uncertainty. They’re always there.

You still do everything you can to make a life for yourself and the people you hold close.

All the while, somewhere in the back of your mind, you know that if the current decides to take you, you can only surrender to it. You can only hope it remembers where it found you, the end indistinguishable from the beginning, and gives you one more chance to be what you once were. 

Sidney Crosby’s career wasn’t impossible. It was just an outsized expression of one man’s love.

And a reminder, for the rest of us, of love’s great reward.