Eventually, the wagon lurches off American pavement and into Tamaulipas, the Mexican state lying south of Texas along the Gulf Coast, Lopez crossing from one half of the Rio Grande Valley into the other. From the border, it’s another seven miles to his final destination in Rio Bravo. On the way, he stops at his mother’s house, these trips his only opportunity to visit. She insists he eat before he leaves, as she always does, hoping to fortify her son before an afternoon in the oppressive heat. But Lopez’s anticipation outweighs his hunger, and soon he’s on the road again.

After winding through Rio Bravo’s bustling streets, he finally parks the wagon and steps out with butterflies in his stomach. He retrieves his gear from the trunk, and pauses for a moment, just to take in the sight of it. There, nestled amid a crown of lush green trees, encased in an oval of sky-blue concrete that delineates where town ends and oasis begins: a hockey rink.

Laying his gear down at the rink’s edge, Lopez crosses over the faceoff circle and climbs up into the grandstand to look out over the concrete paradise. It’s hardly his first viewing. The 42-year-old has been coming here nearly every weekend for more than two decades, since back when it was first opened as a futsal park and he and his friends quickly sealed its fate by covering the goals at each end and dropping hockey nets in their place. Even then, his love for the game was already well-established. As a teenager Lopez was so addicted his mother once followed him around town because she refused to believe the reason her son was coming home late every night was because he’d devoted himself to this strange sport. She relented after finding him roller-skating by himself, wiring pucks into a net at 11 p.m.

He’s doing the same this afternoon as the usual cast of characters filters in for game time and sets up by the boards. Soon after, the puck finally drops, and in that moment, it’s all worth it. So deep is Lopez’s love of hockey, the weekly 30-mile journey across the border to Rio Bravo is a small price to pay for these games — for the chance to show off his silky hands; the chance to set up behind the net, flip the puck onto his blade and hit netminder Javier with his own iteration of The Michigan Goal.

Hidden away in Tamaulipas, a small but dedicated hockey community has been hitting the pavement for games like this for years. And on the other side of the Valley, Lopez and fellow hockey lover Nathaniel Mata are hoping to tap into the same model that nurtured that passion, to build upon what Mexico already has and help the game flourish across the border, as well. But after seeing once-loved teams leave town, after seeing the area’s only ice rink shut down by the pandemic, hockey is hanging on by a thread in south Texas. Now, Lopez, Mata and their non-profit, RGV Roller, have aligned to reignite interest in the sport, fight for its place in the Valley, and offer the hockey world a blueprint for how to grow the game even in the unlikeliest of locales.

It was the sting of that disappointment, and a couple decades of struggle to keep up his fandom in his mostly hockey-less corner of Texas, that spurred Mata — RGV Roller’s president — to put the organization’s wheels into motion in September 2019. By that point, he’d found his way back to the game. After years of trying to nudge neighbours into giving the sport a try, Mata eventually came across Lopez and his fellow Tamaulipas expats playing at that same McAllen rink. He went out, bought some roller skates, and decided to dive in. It wasn’t quite the on-ice dream he’d once had in California — it was something different, and it was glorious. But even with his own desire to play finally satisfied, Mata couldn’t shake the need to ensure other kids in south Texas didn’t have to endure a similar years-long wait just to find a game.

He saw only one solution. “The way to grow the sport is with youth and it’s with kids and it’s with making the sport affordable,” Mata says. So, he went to work plotting out his vision for a Valley hockey youth movement. He brought together those on the scene who also seemed to see the importance of involving the next generation, assembling a board that reflected both sides of the Valley’s hockey experience. “I think I come with an interesting perspective to RGV Roller, because a couple of the people on our board are people that have played hockey a lot of their life, and I’m someone who has loved hockey my entire life, but I didn’t really get to play,” he says. “I pour my heart and soul into this, because I feel like I was deprived of this great sport for so long.”

Jacqueline Arias joined the budding project as a board member soon after. She and Mata had met while working for their university paper, often sitting in the stands of the McAllen rink in those days talking about how they wished hockey had a greater presence in their town. Arias brought with her the perspective of someone who had grown up with even less of a connection to the sport, its total absence from her younger days fostering a deeper understanding of the barriers RGV Roller would need to navigate. “I grew up in Donna, Texas, and it’s a pretty poor community,” Arias says. “For us, it’s pretty hard to get access to pretty expensive sports. It’s not really in our high schools or anything like that. So, for me, it’s, how do we get people like me, who grew up in a poor community, people in colonias, those communities who have been harder hit, to get involved in the sport? How do we provide that avenue?”

The first step was simply access. In January 2020, RGV Roller officially announced itself to the south Texas community with a cookout and a free session at that rink in McAllen. Sticks were available for kids to pick up and try out, to get a tangible feel for what the sport’s all about. Looking back on his own introduction to the game, and at Arias’s, Mata felt putting sticks in hands was key. “If you experience [hockey], it’s so much different than if you just watch it,” he says. “You’re doing something that’s foreign — it’s not just dribbling a basketball, it’s not just swinging a bat. If you’re Canadian, maybe it feels like it’s a part of your DNA, but I mean, for me, it was really different. And I think for a lot of people down here, it still is different. But it’s so much fun.”

The first few months of 2020 saw early signs of life. That January event drew a crowd of 50, more than they’d expected for their low-key debut. Momentum continued to pick up at a second event the next month, young parents from the area flocking to the rink, eager to find out when they’d be able to sign their kids up. “We had a really good community turnout, just parents on Facebook finding our event, that never knew about hockey either,” Arias remembers. “And their kids loved it.”

Joe Haske, who’s played with Lopez for years since moving to the Valley from Michigan, remembers feeling the community’s attention shift. “We were playing on some of the basketball courts when we couldn’t play anywhere else, and a lot of kids would stop and watch us,” he says. “They’d take their parents over and wanted to see us playing. Their parents would ask how they could get their kids involved. They wanted to get to the rink and play.”

“That was right before the pandemic hit,” says Arias. “We really thought we were so close. 2020 was supposed to be the year that we kicked off everything. We were hoping to do summer camps for kids. [Lopez] is a teacher and a coach, so we were ready to start those big camps. But, yeah, the pandemic.”

As it turned out, enough kids in enough towns throughout Mexico had picked up roller hockey in the years since The Mighty Ducks’ arrival that in ’96, a tournament was launched, bringing together teams from every state. It was there that The Doctor’s squad became the stuff of local legend. In the second year of the tournament, the Diaz Ordaz crew entered representing Tamaulipas. They wound up claiming a gold medal, starting a run that saw Tamaulipas finish as the country’s best for more than a decade straight. So dominant was the team from that tiny border town that Diaz Ordaz was selected as the site of the country’s first proper roller hockey rink, built at the end of that main road in the late ’90s.

Ask Lopez or any others on that Tamaulipas team what it was that allowed them to put together their sterling run, and the answer is always the same: The Doctor. “He might’ve not been the biggest expert in hockey but he was a very good leader,” explains Bruno Arjona, who was part of the next wave of kids to train with The Doctor, his first trip to the Diaz Ordaz rink in 2006, at age 11. “He tried to learn as much about hockey as possible, soak it in, and then in his own way, teach us what he learned.”

Unconventional as the method was, it allowed a small-town kid like Arjona access to big dreams. Weekends in Diaz Ordaz eventually turned into a trip to the AAU Junior Olympic Games, to represent Mexico. Soon after came two roller world championships, and then four Division III world junior championships with Mexico’s national ice hockey team. “I’ve worked with a lot of coaches during my years, and a lot of coaches … [who] have played some very high-level hockey and that definitely know hockey more than him,” Arjona says of The Doctor, “but he’s the best coach I’ve ever had.”

The legacy of that humble dream factory in Diaz Ordaz has been far-reaching. The Doctor’s program became a feeder for the Mexican national teams, granting others like Arjona the chance to travel the world and represent their country. It took Julian Ramirez, one of The Doctor’s nephews, a step further. A toddler waddling around when Lopez and Co. were learning the ropes, Ramirez became the first Mexican national invited to an NHL development camp when he later earned a brief spin with the Stars. The program didn’t just help the kids in Tamaulipas find a life in the game, though — it also instilled in many of them the desire to pay The Doctor’s work forward.

Miguel eventually moved to Playa del Carmen and, inspired by his father’s efforts, started a hockey program of his own. Eduardo Grosso, another Diaz Ordaz alum, went on to help run a kids program in Mexico City that recently earned a partnership with the Los Angeles Kings. Meanwhile, Lopez and many of the others he grew up playing alongside in those early days, moved across the border into south Texas, hoping to one day find a way to spread the good word of the game on the American side of the Valley.

For them, there was one key lesson to be learned from Diaz Ordaz. “In this little town, Diaz Ordaz, where we would train for the Tamaulipas team, the facilities are actually much nicer than the facilities we have here on [the American] side of the border. But most importantly, they’re open,” Arjona says. “It’s accessible to the public. All you’ve got to do is drive down that main road and you’re going to get to the rink. And it doesn’t matter what time of day it is, who you’re with, or if you reserved a spot. You can just play hockey.”

That accessibility was crucial for allowing natural, early interest in the game to grow into full-fledged obsession, says Lopez. It’s what allowed them to feel like they were part of the hockey world, even if they didn’t have an ice rink or thousands to spend to play. Looking at other sports that have managed to grow in communities hockey hasn’t yet reached, the value of creating such an environment becomes even clearer. It’s simple, yet all-important — for hockey to take hold in places where soccer or basketball or baseball reign supreme, it has to, at the very least, be as present and available. It has to be as easy as walking up to a field or a court with a ball and letting your imagination run wild.

He tried to spark some interest himself. By the early ’90s, he was organizing pick-up games, coaching his two boys and a few other kids in the area who tagged along until more quintessentially Texan sports pulled them away. But the efforts gained little momentum among those who weren’t already familiar with hockey, having played elsewhere.

Even the presence of a bona fide pro team did little to bring about lasting growth. The Central Hockey League’s Rio Grande Valley Killer Bees arrived in south Texas in 2003, filling a 6,500-seat arena regularly for a few years before fizzling out after nine seasons. A junior-A team of the same name sprouted up a year later, only to fold after a pair of seasons. A third iteration of the Killer Bees, another junior team, gave it a try a few years after that. It failed the same year it was founded.

The hits for the hockey community in south Texas just kept coming. In 2005, that outdoor rink in McAllen was built, Lewis having pushed for its approval for years. But the city opted to keep it under lock and key for paid rentals, despite Lewis’s repeated protests, limiting its use to those willing and able to pay to play. More recently, a warehouse in the area was converted to an ice rink, becoming a regular spot for the expats. It was permanently shuttered in March, days before Lopez and Co.’s rec league championship final, the pandemic rendering it too costly to keep afloat.

But even after all the starts and stops, the Valley’s hockey lovers refuse to give up. And in RGV Roller, Mata hopes he’s found the key to finally unlocking the region’s passion for the sport — not by mounting a grandiose plan to bring another pro team to south Texas or get a sprawling ice rink built in McAllen, but by implementing the simple, organic approach that allowed the game to take hold in Diaz Ordaz. “I think you grow hockey by giving hockey,” Mata says, “not by telling hockey people, ‘Hey, you should accept new people.’ I think new people just need to make their own path, and that [starts] by giving them the gift of hockey.” So, that’s what they’ve tried to do.

Their efforts resumed in the early months of 2021, a year after RGV Roller took its first steps, when Texas reopened. While Mata and his team were wary of the loosening restrictions, it did mean they could begin rekindling the fire they’d sparked 12 months prior. They soon found it had never really gone out. They began holding open skates twice a month, 20 to 30 kids and their parents filling the rink each time to take a spin around, shoot some pucks, and begin falling in love with the sport. They launched an adult roller league, their first season enough of a success that plans have been made for a second season to fill the second half of the year. And as Mata, Lopez and the rest of the local veterans started hitting the McAllen rink for that inaugural campaign each week, a funny thing happened: the stands started to fill, locals coming out to watch what would be akin to a run-of-the-mill beer league elsewhere in the country. McAllen’s mayor took in a game, they had frontline workers drop pucks for ceremonial faceoffs, and they finished the year by handing out a comically large championship trophy in front of a cheering crowd.

It’s come slowly, but the RGV Roller team has seen the impact of their focus on that grassroots approach. “We have this one little girl who hasn’t missed a single skate,” Mata says. “She went from just wearing the regular Rollerblades to a pair of hockey skates that she’s into now. She got a Mighty Ducks jersey.” Though the lingering pandemic has delayed their ability to dive headfirst into their lengthy list of plans — and prevented them from opening up the rink to full capacity — their next steps are plotted out: a slew of learn-to-skate and learn-to-play camps; an equipment bank to lend gear to kids who can’t afford it; a development league for new players, who can eventually move on to join Lopez and the other veterans; and an adopt-a-player program that will see each of those veterans mentor a younger member of the fledgling hockey community, coaching them and donating gear.

But while the seeds have been planted and the early returns suggest RGV Roller might just create something long-lasting in south Texas, Mata hasn’t lost sight of the bigger picture. “I see it almost as hockey’s last stand down here,” he says. “Because we had an ice rink, and we had a minor-league hockey team, that then turned into a junior hockey team, but those teams have left — years ago now. The ice rink closed. So, it kind of feels like we’re holding onto hockey by a thread, and I’m really trying to make sure there is a future for hockey here.”

It’s not just the addresses of the rinks, though. It’s also about expanding what we think of as hockey, and who we think of as hockey players. It’s about showing communities of colour that they can be part of this game, too. “They might not think it’s for them, they might think, ‘Oh that’s an up-north sport, that’s a white sport’ … Yeah, if you turn on the TV, that’s how it looks. But hockey doesn’t only exist in the NHL, and it doesn’t even exist only on ice,” Mata says. “When I was a kid, I played a lot of street hockey, and it was definitely hockey to me, you know what I mean? It wasn’t kind of hockey, it was hockey.”

Those leading the big-picture efforts to grow the game also see value in focusing on roller hockey as a means of combatting the sport’s accessibility issues. “Those are all of the things that we have been speaking about — how do we make the sport more culturally available, more safe and welcoming in communities?” says Kim Davis, the NHL’s executive vice president of social impact, growth initiatives and legislative affairs. “We know that street and ball hockey and roller hockey are going to be some of the ways in which we can do that. … It’s low pressure, so you can dip your toe in the water to see if you like it. It starts as a low time commitment. It’s close to home, low travel. These are all of the perceived impediments, particularly for communities of colour, that hockey faces. And I think the idea of ball and street and roller hockey is a wonderful way to eliminate those impediments.”

What’s happened in the Valley — from RGV Roller all the way back to The Doctor and his Tamaulipas dream team — shows the potential of that approach. Of what can happen if space is made for newcomers. “It breaks down one of those myths about communities of colour, that because a community may be socio-economically disadvantaged, that they aren’t going to engage,” Davis says. “If you inspire a community and family to be part of something, and their kids are interested in it, they are going to find ways — through family collaboration, through communities working together — to provide the resources and to provide the access for the kids. And they’re going to consume the sport, so that builds fandom.”

Maybe one day, down the line, the gap between the Valley and the big leagues won’t be so great. Maybe the wild chapters authored so far — from The Mighty Ducks miracle in Diaz Ordaz to the roller revolution in McAllen — are just the beginning of a story that ends with their own Hollywood-esque ascent. What’s the harm in dreaming big? “There’s so much talent down here, and maybe it’s not junior or NHL professional talent, but at the same time, who knows?” Mata says. “If the resources were here, if we had a bigger hockey infrastructure, I think the sky would be the limit. … If you put a street hockey rink on every few blocks, and then every couple of towns has a roller rink, and then every region has an ice rink, I think you would see the farm system created organically.”

Lopez can see it, too. He need only look to how much things have already changed in the Valley since he was that kid shooting pucks into the night by himself to understand what could one day be possible. “We just grew up in a small community, [but] had we had the right focus, I believe more players would be trying out for the NHL from Mexico,” he says. If it seems unlikely, just look back at the sport’s roots, at other countries that once seemed unimaginable hockey hotbeds — until they weren’t. “Ten years from now, instead of looking across the ocean into Europe, and bringing players from Europe, we’re going to look to players from Mexico. Because 10 years from now, I believe it’s going to grow a lot,” Lopez says. “If the formula works over there in Canada, I don’t see why the formula wouldn’t work over here.”

But before they fully take on the loftier aspirations they have in mind — those visions of showing the hockey world that roller can be the key to growing the sport, to unlocking the potential in communities all over North America that have been underestimated and overlooked — RGV Roller has one central goal to focus on first: making sure the love of the game has room to bloom, flourish, and grow tall in the Valley.

“We’ve got to spread this sport here. We’ve got to get our beautiful community of colour involved,” says Arias. “Our area is really poor, the poorest in the state of Texas, across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. And that would be the dream, right? To get our community access to that. Because it’s something we’ve never had before.”

No one understands the depth of Garland’s marine love better than Cam Askew. A fellow Massachusetts native, he and Garland became best pals during their run as linemates for the QMJHL’s Moncton Wildcats. Sitting next to each other on the team bus for three years, Askew would routinely pull up photos of random sharks on his phone during daily rides, putting Garland’s knowledge to the test.

“He would just show me a picture and be like, ‘What kind?’ And listen, I can get it,” says Garland, beaming with pride. “Nine out of 10 times, I can get it — or, like, a relative of it.”

Watch Garland man the right wing for the Canucks, and the obsession makes a strange kind of sense. Whether during his time in the big leagues, his dominant run in junior hockey, or any of the teams he suited up for prior, one thing’s long been true of Garland’s game: he doesn’t float or meander. He doesn’t hesitate. He’s a shark in the water, fearless and intentional in his approach to the game — and in his faith in his abilities. “Conor’s a guy that sticks to his guns,” Donato says. “I mean, he liked sharks as a kid and he likes sharks as an adult. … Whatever he really feels or believes, he’s kind of stubborn in the way he thinks [about it], whether it’s watching one movie, Jaws, or opinions about anything. It’s just the way he is.”

If not for that stubbornness translating into a steadfast belief in himself, Garland might’ve never made it to this point. Turned away by team after team in high school, told he was too small to play more times than he can count, buried on the fourth line when he finally began his pro career, he’s been doubted at every turn. Now, after clawing his way to the big leagues and fighting to become an everyday NHLer, Garland finds himself against the ropes again. His Canucks have dug themselves a deep hole, allowed the doubts to stockpile, their early struggles prompting ownership to clean house above them. But Garland’s been here before. And as his team begins to navigate its way out of the dark, the fiery winger is emerging as a leader by doing what he’s done his entire career.

The further Garland travelled on the path toward his big-league dream, the more obstacles were dropped in his way. Leaving Massachusetts in 2010 for Shattuck-St. Mary’s, the famed Minnesota boarding school that helped mold NHL stars like Sidney Crosby and Nathan MacKinnon, 14-year-old Garland was passed over for the school’s top team, relegated to the Tier 2 squad. Before he had a chance to go back and vie for a top spot, he had to leave Shattuck altogether. “My mom got sick that summer,” he says. “She had Lyme disease and it led to a small stroke and Bell’s palsy, so she was sick for a couple of years. It was at the point where I couldn’t be cross country. I had to be home with my family.”

His mother, Bridget, thankfully recovered, he says, but back then, the situation was a lot to bear for a teenager far from home. And amid the turmoil of leaving school, heading back to Scituate, and worrying about his family, Garland had another wrinkle to sort out: he needed a team. “I came home and didn’t really have a place to play,” he says. And despite dominating his lone year at Shattuck to the tune of 65 goals and 116 points in 52 games, the Boston high-school circuit seemed uninterested in his talents. “I was asking teams to play. I tried to go to B.C. High [Boston College High School] and the coach didn’t think I could play there. And then at Thayer [Academy], Tony Amonte didn’t think I could play there.” Only one coach didn’t turn him away — Boston Junior Bruins bench boss Chris Masters. So that’s where Garland went. “I think having that rejection at a young age and having people to prove wrong at such a young age usually doesn’t happen for NHL players,” Garland says. “Usually they have it easy until they start to get to the pros and then they have a little bit of a struggle. But that was almost better for me, just to have it at a young age and then have a chip on my shoulder.”

Masters didn’t need much convincing to toss a jersey Garland’s way. He’d had him on a summer team as a six-year-old, and knew what the young winger could do with the puck on his stick. More than just Garland’s raw skill back then, it was how he’d fared compared to the others on that summer squad that most impressed Masters, that team dotted with future superstars like Jack Eichel and William Nylander. Despite that lofty competition, Garland still managed to separate himself from the pack. “He was a standout on a team of standouts,” Masters says.

When the two reunited in 2011 for the Junior Bruins, it was much the same, even with Eichel returning to the squad as well. “He was a top player from the very first practice,” Masters says of Garland. “He was a great skater, [had] great speed, quickness, anticipation. He was really smart offensively, had a scorer’s touch, but also was really creative.” But there was something distinct that separated Garland from the other high-flying scorers in the area at the time. “He’s also a kid who has no fear,” says Masters. “He would go across the middle. He’d go to the net. He would go into corners. He wouldn’t take the long way to get to a corner or to a puck.” That was no small feat given how exaggerated the size discrepancy between Garland and his opponents was at that point. But he learned to bob and weave around that obstacle like he had all the others. “He was tough to track down,” says Masters. “He was small, and he was playing against kids who were 18, 19, in some cases 20. And he’s probably a pretty frustrating kid to play against — he can make you look silly. But you can’t hit what you can’t catch.”

Gifted, driven and fueled by years of stockpiling doubts, Garland was already a handful. But on the Junior Bruins he found something he hadn’t in Minnesota, something that pushed him to an even higher level: the chance to skate alongside someone who could see the game as he could. “We made each other better,” he says of leading that team alongside future second-overall pick Eichel. “You could feel in practice — I wanted to show that I was the best; he wanted to show that he was the best. In games, he wanted to produce, I wanted to produce. … We just pushed each other. It was great to have somebody like that at such a young age.” Likely less enjoyable for the rest of the Empire Junior Hockey League — the pair led those Junior Bruins through the season easily, dropping only six of their 40 games, Garland pacing the team in goals, assists and penalty minutes.

There’s one particular game that stands out among the rest for Masters, one night that encapsulated who Garland was at that time. “It was a game at Bridgewater, which is down on the South Shore where he was from,” the coach says. “We were a top team in the league, the team we were playing was kind of middle of the pack. He wasn’t having his best game, taking some bad penalties, cheating it a little bit in the defensive zone.” So Masters turned to a tried-and-true coaching tactic — “I sat him for about 10 minutes.” Garland remembers it well, too. “When you’re that young and you get benched, you don’t pout but you’re just angry,” he says. “Back then, I probably didn’t understand it. So, I was just angry.” Chip on shoulder activated.

“After that 10 minutes,” Masters continues, “I said, ‘Hey, you understand why you got sat?’

‘Yep.’

‘All right, let’s see if you’ve learned from it.’”

Garland hopped over the boards and the ice tilted. “In the third period, he scored a hat trick and we won the game by a goal,” Masters says with a laugh. “He had the right attitude, which was, ‘I understood it. I got it. Now I’m going to go out and do my thing.’ And he just took the game over.”

It hadn’t taken long during that campaign for Garland’s teammates to realize it was going to be a special year. “I think we kind of knew a month into the season,” Askew says. “The first month, he was playing unreal — point-per-game, doing his thing. But our captain got injured … [Conor] got bumped up to play with [Ivan] Barbashev. And them two, they went off.” Something seemed to just click between Garland and the eventual St. Louis Blues centreman, their instant chemistry the step that lifted Garland’s game to a whole new level. “It was just something special every night. It was a hat trick, six points. I mean, just putting our team on his back, really,” Askew remembers. “He got that spot on the top line and never let it go.”

The next year, he did it again, putting up 128 points to become the only player other than Crosby to ever lead the CHL in scoring more than once. For those who were there to see it happen, the catalyst for Garland’s dominance is no mystery. “He’s by far the most competitive player that I’ve ever coached,” says Darren Rumble, who was behind the bench for both of those breakout seasons. “He just had ‘compete’ ingrained in his DNA.” Askew and fellow Massachusetts native Zach Malatesta formed a tight bond with Garland during their time in Moncton, the trio connecting over a shared love of their home state by meeting up to watch “Boston movies” — The Town and Good Will Hunting among their favourites. But they knew if a win was in Garland’s sights — whether it was a casual game of ping-pong, a pre-game sewer-ball session or a battle on the ice — that friendship went out the window. “He’d never want to lose. Whether it’s practice, summer skates or a playoff game, it didn’t matter,” says Malatesta. “He just never gives up. His work ethic and skill, that combination — I just knew he had something special.”

When Garland finally moved on to the next level, though, he was viewed as anything but special. After being passed over in his first year of draft eligibility, the winger was finally tabbed with the 123rd-overall pick in the 2015 NHL Draft by Arizona. Earning his first shot as a pro in 2016 with their AHL affiliate, the Tucson Roadrunners, he arrived in the desert only to find himself buried on the fourth line. Not the step up he’d imagined after putting together one of the most dominant two-year runs in junior hockey history. “It was surprising,” Garland says. “I remember the first game in the American League, I had like two shifts in the first period. I remember sitting on the bench like, ‘This stinks.’ Like, ‘This is not what I’m used to, I don’t know what’s going on.’ I remember I just didn’t play a lot, and it went on forever, obviously — I probably played three to five minutes a night.”

By this point, he’d been hearing the comments from naysayers for a decade. And sitting on that bench, so close to his dream but still so very far from it, he began to wonder if the doubters were right. “You know, after 30 games, you have four points, you’re starting to think, ‘Do I stink? What’s going on? Why can’t I score?’” he says. “You used to hear, ‘Oh, he’s not a pro player, just a junior.’ So then I’m like, ‘Maybe everybody else was right.’”

A coaching change after his rookie year helped him stave off those doubts. In came Mike Van Ryn to lead the bench, the former NHLer shifting the Roadrunners’ approach to utilize what they had throughout their lineup. When it came to Garland, the new coach made clear Year 2 was going to be different. He and his staff were going to develop Garland, he told the winger, give him his confidence back. They were going to turn him into a pro. “And they did,” Garland says. “That second year is kind of where my career changed.”

Slowly, the numbers started improving, bumping up in that second year and swelling the next, Garland scoring at more than a point-per-game pace by his third year in the AHL. That growth was the result of more than just a change in tactics or a spot on a new line.  “I just think having someone believe in you is everything, you know?” says Garland. “You’re lucky at that point to get people like that to help you. And I just remember once I got my confidence back and started playing the way they taught me, then I was all set.”

His progress during that third year in the minors led to another milestone moment in early December 2018, when Garland got the call to make his NHL debut, brought up to face (who else?) the Sharks.

It went terribly, by Garland’s own assessment, the weight of the moment limiting his impact. “I waited my whole life for it,” he says of that first game. “You think you overthink something happening in a week — I overthought that thing for 25 years.” Unimpressive as it might’ve been, though, the debut performance was enough to earn a second game. And when the club headed back to Boston for that next tilt, back to friends and family who could calm his nerves, Garland managed to show what he could do, earning a chance to stick with the big club. “We all knew he’d be fine — all he needed was his chance in the NHL and he wasn’t going back down,” says Askew, who was watching proudly from afar. “That was his shot. He wasn’t going to let it go.”

It took time for Garland to settle in with the Coyotes. In the beginning, he kept to himself, focusing on trying to navigate life in the NHL. But as the months wore on, the same magnetism that seemed to draw people in wherever he’d played began pulling the club’s veterans closer. “You just saw guys gravitate to him, you know?” says Rick Tocchet, the Coyotes’ head coach at the time. “[Clayton] Keller, [Jakob] Chychrun, Phil Kessel, they were together constantly. And he was kind of the ringleader there.” The veterans dined out on their new rookie’s obsession with Boston, conversations quickly turning into debates about Tom Brady, or the Red Sox, or the Celtics. But it was what Garland did on the ice that truly endeared him to his new team.

“I mean, he scored a goal in Edmonton where there was a slapshot that went off his face into the net — and he scored another goal that game,” says Tocchet. “You know, he had cuts all over his face, and he’s interviewing with Hockey Night in Canada. I think that kind of took off, like, ‘Hey man, this guy’s not afraid.’”

After putting up 22 goals and 39 points in his first full NHL campaign, Garland followed up with another 39-point performance for the club last season, this time reaching the total in 19 fewer games. And much like everything else that’s come his way on the ice, it wasn’t just natural growth that brought that progress — it was Garland’s stubborn belief in his own potential, coupled with a willingness to invest the hours and sweat needed to reach it.

Tocchet remembers one particular conversation with the winger when he saw those gears turning. “We were at centre ice at the start of the year, and I said to him, ‘You’re not an 18-minute player in my eyes,’” the coach recalls of the moment, back when Garland was averaging around 14 minutes a night. “He looked me in the eyes, and he challenged me — he goes, ‘Well, make me an 18-minute player. Coach me into an 18-minute player.’” So Tocchet hit him with some hard truths. “I said, ‘You’re going to hear some stuff that you might not like. You’ve got to be more structured, you’ve got to play better defensive hockey. I love the fact that you’re an instinctual player, but you’ve also got to be a system guy, too, when you need to be.’ That was one thing that he took to heart. He worked on his game, watched video, worked on that hard in practice.

“The one thing he does is the next day, he shows up and he’s raring to go again. Even if he had a bad night or he didn’t agree with a coach or he didn’t like his game, the next day, he punches the clock again.”

By the end of his final year in Arizona, Garland’s average ice time sat at 17:55.

On a Friday in late July, he was thrown back into the spotlight when news broke that he and longtime teammate Oliver Ekman-Larsson were traded from the Coyotes to the Canucks, the winger signing a five-year, $24.75-million deal with his new club soon after. It was a bittersweet turning of the page, leaving the only NHL organization he’d ever known, but the move brought back a taste of what he’d had the last time he played for a team north of the border, when he was lighting up the opposition every night: the chaos of a Canadian market, the chance to play for a city where his sport is the main attraction, to witness the passion of a buzzing Rogers Arena if enough wins were strung together.

In the early going this season, the chaos has far outweighed any buzz in the arena. While Garland emerged as one of the few Canucks who played well early on — ranking among the team’s top scorers and doing what he could each night to drag them into the fight — the losses continued to pile up until a coaching change eventually slowed the fall. But those who know him best know this is precisely the fight Garland’s built for.

“[It’s] obviously a pressure cooker there, but I think he embraces that. He wants that,” says Tocchet. “He wants to be on the ice, 2–2 game with six minutes left and the pressure on him to make something happen. … I think he wants to meet it head on. ‘Get me out there. Let me have the puck in these situations — if I don’t produce, it’s on me.’ I think that’s his attitude, and I think that’s the attitude that you have to have when you go into those markets.”

Bigger picture, beyond helping to pull the Canucks out of this current hole, Garland’s hope is that Vancouver sees him make good on the potential he’s long seen in himself. Because in his eyes, he hasn’t yet come close. “I wouldn’t say I’m a star or I’ve had too much success,” he says. “I’m only 25. You know, I follow a lot of hockey history and [have tracked] the trajectory of some smaller guys that are like me, when they hit their peaks and when they do their best. And it seems like at my age, you just start coming into your own. Hopefully that’s the same with me.”

His former coaches mention one name in particular when discussions of Garland turn to what the latter stages of his career could look like: Martin St. Louis.

Rumble, Garland’s coach in Moncton, spent some time alongside St. Louis in Tampa Bay back in his own playing days, watching the winger emerge as a dominant force in his late 20s and early 30s. He sees, at the very least, a similar fire in both players. “Those guys have been told, ‘You can’t do it’ so many times in their life, they just have that ‘I’ll show you’ attitude,” he says.

Tocchet coached St. Louis for two of the Hall of Famer’s world-beating seasons with the Lightning. He saw firsthand what that attitude reaped. “I’m not going to put him in Marty St. Louis’ category right now, but Marty St. Louis, a small player with a huge heart that was just a dynamic player — a guy like that is someone that Conor can look towards,” Tocchet says. Though Garland’s a long way from St. Louis’ prolific scoring touch, it’s that fire, again, that connects them, says the coach: “Both were not afraid.”

As for touching the rest of St. Louis’ legacy, it’s a lofty goal. But ask those who know Garland best, and they’d caution against heaping too much doubt on his name. Donato’s been there since Garland’s earliest days on the ice. He’s skated with him over countless summers, discussed the winding path to the NHL with him, faced off against him in the big leagues. He knows better than most the promise of Garland’s potential, and the mistake of questioning how far he can push himself. “Conor’s earned everything he’s got,” Donato says. “At every level, he produced. And even though he was producing, he would never get the respect. … Now in pro, he’s still producing and doing those things, and there’s still people that doubt him. But I think that’s what drives Conor.”

Whether you doubt him or believe, know that Conor Garland will come back, time and time again. He’ll keep pushing and clawing and battling, as he always has — it’s just the way he’s wired, says Tocchet. It’s that, above all else, that stands out to the coach when he thinks back on their time together in Arizona. That fire. “A lot of times I remember, the last couple years, he was in the middle of things, in a scrum. They’re punching him in the head, he’s sticking in there, he’s yelling at them — and then he’s right back the next shift, right in that same area again,” Tocchet says. “It’s tough to go back in that area again, with those big defencemen — who wants to get hit in the face again, right? But I think it shows the other team, man, this guy’s not going away, you know?

“He’s not going to go away.”

The play started when one of Guhle’s Raiders teammates missed him with a drop pass just inside the Saskatoon Blades blue line. In a flash, the action was headed back toward the Prince Albert goal and when Blades left winger Egor Sidorov received the breakaway pass, his skates were crossing the Raiders blue line while Guhle was just passing over the centre-ice red. As Sidorov raced to chase down the puck that had caromed off his blade and into the Raiders end, Guhle just devoured the half-zone head start, like a predator chasing a less-fortunate link in the food chain. With the second period dwindling and the two players screaming toward the Prince Albert net, Guhle fully extended his stick and thwarted Sidorov’s attempt on Raiders stopper Carter Serhyenko. The puck wound up in the corner to the right of Serhyenko, while Sidorov and Guhle slammed into the end boards. Right at that moment, the horn blasted to signal the end of the frame, adding a sort of dramatic punctuation to the play. “You don’t find guys who are six-two, six-three and 200 pounds who can move like the wind,” says Raiders centre Ozzy Wiesblatt. “He’s extremely shifty, too. I think it’s super rare to find a guy like that, who can play all over the ice, jump up in the play with ease and get back even easier.”

Precisely how rare a find Guhle winds up being for the Montreal Canadiens is something that will only become clear over years. The belief, though, is that this 19-year-old selected 16^th overall at the 2020 NHL Draft by former general manager Marc Bergevin has a chance to be a long-term stabilizing element for an organization that has experienced endless upheaval since losing the Stanley Cup Final last July. That team’s defence corps was anchored by Shea Weber, whose ailing body may prevent him from ever taking another NHL shift. His absence has left the Canadiens rudderless at times this season, fumbling through the dark without their trusted guide. The kind of lynchpin Weber was for the Habs is certainly what Team Canada will expect from Guhle when he dons the red-and-white at the upcoming World Junior Championship for the second straight year. Camp wraps today and it would surprise nobody if Guhle is named team captain before the tournament starts on Boxing Day.

The comparison game always comes with its perils, but Habs fans who want to run wild drawing lines between Weber and Guhle have their share of fodder. Beyond a similar on-ice approach and no-nonsense demeanor, they’re both western boys whose formative major junior time was spent being coached by a staff featuring head man Marc Habscheid and assistant Jeff . And hearing Habscheid talk about the heart-and-soul player he had in the Prince Albert fold for more than four years, one has to believe there are echoes of the way the coach may have described the Kelowna Rockets’ “Mountain Man” nearly 20 years ago. “He’s multi-dimensional,” Habscheid says of Guhle. “Very good man and good heart and incredible person. And once the puck drops, he’s playing to win. He gets his eyebrows down and he can be nasty.”

That figures to be wonderful news both for fans of Canadian hockey this holiday season and Canadiens backers dreaming of better days.

The elder Guhle — a second-round pick of the Buffalo Sabres in 2015 who has 59 NHL games on his resume — was in the final year of his WHL career in the spring of 2017 when the Raiders — who were rebuilding and had traded Brendan to the Prince George Cougars — won the WHL Bantam Draft Lottery. “I remember getting off the ice and seeing that,” Brendan recalls. “I was pretty excited because I was about 99.9-per cent sure he was going to P.A.”

During that season, Kaiden — already a big kid — had worn the ‘C’ for his U-15 Okanagan Hockey Academy team and led the squad in scoring. As if that wasn’t enticing enough, the Raiders also had the added advantage of knowing Kaiden and his family from the times they came to see Brendan play. That made the choice a slam dunk. “His brother was just a prince of a man and really good player,” Habscheid says. “[The familiarity] helped both Kaiden and the Raiders.”

Despite that family connection, Guhle had to pay his dues. As a Western League rookie in 2018–19, he was a 16-year-old on a squad that was back on the upswing and featured a veteran-laden blue line. That meant there were games when Guhle didn’t see a ton of ice time and the odd one he was scratched from the lineup. That’s a sobering reality for any teenager who’s dominated every level he’s played at, but Habscheid said he never found Guhle in a huff. “Not once did he complain,” Habscheid says. “He just believed in the process and kept working hard.”

The process paid off for both Prince Albert and the player. Guhle dressed for all 23 contests of the Raiders’ post-season run, which culminated with a Game 7, OT victory over the Vancouver Giants to win the league title. Playing a supporting role on the Raiders that year fueled Guhle’s desire to be the man when his time arrived. “That kind of just put a hunger inside of me that made me want to be that guy the team can rely on,” he says. “Once you win once, you want to win over and over again.

The following year — a 2019–20 campaign cut short by the start of the pandemic — Guhle established himself as a two-way threat with 40 points in 64 games. With the WHL playoffs and subsequent regular season hijacked by COVID, Guhle wasn’t back in a competitive hockey setting again for 10 months, when Canada began the process of picking its team for the 2021 WJC in Edmonton. By that point, Guhle had been selected by the Habs in the virtual draft held in October. Still, he was by no means a lock for the squad. “I knew I was going to be one of those guys who, if I had a good camp, maybe I had a chance,” he says. “So I was just banking on that: to have a good camp and make the decision [to cut me] tough on them.”

Guhle cracked the team, lining up as its second-youngest defenceman. As was the case when he was a Raiders rookie, he wasn’t a top-pair guy, but earned the trust of coach André Tourigny and the staff. Canada more or less steamrolled its way to the final, where things suddenly turned sour. A team that had been basically flawless against the other good squads at the event couldn’t find a way to stuff the puck past Spencer Knight, as Team USA blanked Canada 2–0. “There were a lot of emotions once we lost that game, seeing those guys raise the trophy and get their gold medals around their neck,” Guhle says. “It was tough to watch.”

Given the overlap in their styles, origin stories and the fact they belong to the same pro organization, the comparison to Weber is a natural one. It’s far from the only potential parallel, though. One scout running comps mentioned the names of Nashville’s Mattias Ekholm and Dallas’s Esa Lindell, two big-bodied blue-liners who’ve earned sparkling reputations for the work they do in their own zones. Ramage actually drew a line to another player connected to Montreal; one who was drafted 12^th overall by the team in 2007, but never suited up for the Habs thanks to a misguided move that saw him traded as a prospect to the New York Rangers.

“I think about a guy like [current Tampa Bay Lighting defenceman] Ryan McDonagh,” Ramage says. “I know him well, my son played with him [at the University of Wisconsin]. I’ve always watched Ryan and he was a defender first. That’s how he went into the NHL with the Rangers. And he just became so good defending that [coach John Tortorella] gave him more. He [thought], ‘I can trust this guy, I know what I’m going to get from him.’ I don’t think Ryan plays first-unit power play, but he plays power play. He’s developed into a guy who has put up points and can play that part of the game. Is Kaiden Ryan McDonagh? I don’t know. But I like that he’s going to solidify his defence first.”

Those in his orbit today certainly have no concerns about Guhle’s offensive abilities. Wiesblatt — a fellow 2020 NHL first-rounder — says he’s got one of the best shots from the point in the Dub. And Dave Cameron, Canada’s coach at the WJC, says he plans to send Guhle over the boards constantly. “He’s a first-round pick with first-round skills,” says Cameron. “He’s going to play for us in all situations.”

Guhle actually got a chance to play pro hockey last year, suiting up for — and looking just fine in — three games with the AHL’s Laval Rocket when the WHL season was still on hiatus. But when his junior season finally did start last February, it lasted just a couple games for Guhle thanks to a busted finger. He was basically on a point-per-game pace with a bottom-tier Prince Albert squad this season, registered two assists in his Oil Kings debut on Dec. 3 and now turns his gaze toward a shot at redemption at a WJC tournament that, once again, will be held in his own backyard of Edmonton and Red Deer.

Brendan says he and his brother talk every two or three days and are always exchanging notes about their games. After last year’s gold-medal loss, though, he gave Kaiden a little space. “I kind of left it alone,” he says. “I obviously know his No. 1 goal at that tournament this year is to help the team win it. Anything less than that is a disappointment in his eyes. That’s where his standards are at.”

As a fellow Albertan of the same age, Wiesblatt has known of Guhle dating back to their days as highly touted prospects for the WHL draft. The pair became close during their time in Saskatchewan and while Wiesblatt agrees the expectations Guhle has for himself are a defining characteristic, he says you can’t just label his friend “Mr. Serious” and move on. “I think he gets the rep of being an extreme professional, and he definitely is,” Wiesblatt says. “But just like the rest of us, he’s a kid at the same time. He hangs out with the guys all the time.”

Brendan always gets a kick out of those times when his brother can properly unwind. It doesn’t really happen on the golf course, because Kaiden is pretty maniacal about his game there, too. But when the boys get out on the boat, usually a couple hours north of Edmonton on Skeleton Lake, all the duties that go with being a hard-driving, aspiring pro can be shelved. “It’s so fun hanging out with him on those days because it’s a side of himself he doesn’t get to show that often,” Brendan says.

The ability to take a step back is likely a good thing for any top prospect being breathlessly observed by a Habs fanbase that now finds itself supporting a sad sack team where suddenly it’s all about the future. Brendan isn’t too concerned about how his kid brother will handle the glare. He chuckles a little relaying the thought that it wouldn’t surprise him in the least if Kaiden’s Instagram just disappeared one day. “He would have no problem doing that,” Brendan says. “He’s pretty good at just shutting [things] down if he’s getting a little rattled. He can turn his phone off and just go for however long without it and it doesn’t bother him.”

The conversations around him, of course, will continue as Guhle makes his way up the ranks and inches closer to full-time duty with the Canadiens. As for any talk of one day playing the Weber role on a new iteration of the squad, it’s just another thing that keeps him grinding. “It’s cool to be put in the same sentence as him,” he says. “But I have enough respect for him [to know] I’m not anywhere close to being there yet.”

True. But this kid has been known to get places fast.