Quote:Every hockey player can remember where their love affair with the sport started.

For most, the spark was struck on the nearest body of water to their homes. As soon as the cold descended and the pond, lake, river or even cow pasture froze solid, the neighborhood kids drifted over with skates and sticks thrown over their shoulders looking for some action. They were rarely disappointed, finding legions of like-minded souls strapping on the blades and gliding around the ice waiting for a game of shinny to break out.

It was there -- on those frozen expanses -- that the players became hooked on the speed, grace and excitement of the game, chasing pucks all over the frozen surface.

There were no boards to constrain their enthusiasm, no coaches to dampen their creativity, no stats to feed their ego. Rules were a matter of efficiency, not a stringent set of decrees laid out in a technical rulebook. All of that, not always for the better, would come later for those that moved on to organized hockey

Allan Watt, the vice president of marketing and communications for the Edmonton Oilers, remembers those early hockey-playing days fondly despite being more than a half-decade removed from such simple pleasures.

That's why he is not surprised that Saturday's Heritage Classic at Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium -- the first outdoor game in the League's 86-year history -- has become the biggest story of the 2003-04 NHL regular season. The game will pit the host Edmonton Oilers against the Montreal Canadiens in a type of atmosphere that each of the 56,169 fans will intuitively understand, having experienced a similar scenario in their own childhoods. As a result, there were more than 70,000 requests made for the 7,000 tickets available to the general public.

"From the time when you're a kid in Canada -- wherever you live in North America where snow flies and you can make a rink, or you go for Christmas and your dad takes you out and he turns you loose and you're gliding on this thing, there's some magic in that," Watt said. "The thought of seeing multi-millionaire hockey players skating around outside playing for real points has captured something, and that's about as simple as I could put it."

In Edmonton, the sounds of skates scraping against the hard outdoor ice and the shrieks of excitement from kids -- and the not-so occasional adult, echoing across the prairie is the soundtrack of winter. It runs from the first freeze of late October until the ice finally melts well into the new year.

"Playing outside, playing hockey outside, you can do it at minus-20 Celsius, and you're still OK because you're outside and people do that here," said Watt. "People go to the lake and scrape it off and skate around on it and it's quite cold. We all grew up doing it and it was brought home again when the Oilers played in Montreal this past week.

"All of the Montreal Canadien players in their dressing room were saying we can't wait to get there because no matter where we're from, Kirkland Lake (Ontario) or Timmins (Ontario), we all did that.

"We all went home from school, put away our homework, lied to our parents and said we got it all done, and played hockey every chance we could. Despite the fact that we had never played an organized game outside, we still played it outside."

For sure, though, the stakes will be a little different come Saturday at Commonwealth stadium.

NHL players will be battling for NHL points. There will be referees and coaches keeping control of the game. The players will be decked out in snazzy uniforms instead of a motley assortment of sweaters and parkas. Millions of fans watching on television for the usual Saturday night Hockey Night in Canada telecast on CBC will join the sell-out crowd at Commonweath Stadium to watch the action -- by far trumping the knot of frozen parents usually on hand for the local outdoor contests.

But, the spirit of the undertaking remains unchanged despite the fancy trappings.

"It's the nostalgia of it all, the thought of playing outdoors," said Montreal defenseman Sheldon Souray, who grew up in Elk Point, Alberta, about 155 miles east of Edmonton. "It's like having an old car for some guys.

"I think the kids today get spoiled with so many indoor rinks and rec centers with four sheets of ice in one complex going up, but some of my best memories are playing on community-league rinks, with mitts on under my hockey gloves, scraping the ice every 10 minutes.

"I played a game on a little outdoor rink a couple of years ago for fun where it was 20 below. I loved it."

Souray's sentiments have been echoed by the Edmonton players for the last month.

"The fans and people throughout northern Alberta are all excited about the game," said Jason Smith, the Oilers' captain. "It's been in the media and a topic of conversation around here since the start of training camp.

"I haven't played outdoors since tyke hockey, you know 6 or 7 years old. But that doesn't mean anything, you know. This does mean something. It should be interesting, that's for sure."

Aside from surely being interesting as the novelty that it is, it will also provide a looking glass back into the game's roots, a reaffirmation of the love affair that for so many began on the frozen ponds of their childhood.