DENVER -- Give any player a chance to name any two linemates he could work with in the Stanley Cup finals and most would pick Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux or someone like Gordie Howe or Mark Messier. Not Avalanche forward Chris Drury.

He doesn't hesitate with his first choice.

"It's no contest," Drury says. "It would be Travis Roy. Not a day goes by that I don't think about him. If times are tough, I think about how tough things have been for Travis."

Roy was Drury's linemate at Boston University on October 20, 1995. Drury was a sophomore and Roy a freshman whose dream was just to play one game of college hockey.

That's all he played. On his first shift, just 11 seconds into the game, he missed a check and slumped helplessly to the ice with a broken neck, a shattered vertebra and damage to his spinal column. It left both of Roy's legs and left arm completely paralyzed and restricted his right arm to slight movements.

"I heard a loud bang and looked around it was like slow motion seeing Travis fall to the ice," Drury says. "He didn't move. I felt like my heart stopped.

"Everyone was concerned about Travis. But I'll never forget when his Dad came onto the ice, Travis said, 'I made it Dad, I made it.'"

Drury has been as much prime time as Deion Sanders is. He won an NCAA title in 1995 and was chosen the Hobey Baker Award winner as college hockey player of the year in 1997-98, he was named Rookie of the Year in the NHL with the Avalanche the next season and now he's on the verge of winning his first Stanley Cup.

But Roy will never leave Drury's memories.

"If I win the Cup, the first one I will share it with is Travis," Drury says. "You can bet on that."

Memories -- good and bad -- run through Drury's mind like a camera running through his head fast-forward.

At 24, Chris is the ultimate big-time athlete.

In the summer of 1989, he was the winning pitcher when Trumbull (Ct.) beat Taiwan in the Little League World Series. After suffering a broken wrist that caused him to change his vocation from baseball to hockey, Drury led Fairfield Prep to the state hockey championship in 1994.

You can bet the Avalanche are happy about that fickle finger of fate.

In the three years he's been in the NHL, Drury has already netted eight playoff game-winning goals. That's nearly half of the 21 playoff goals he's scored.

Drury's eighth game-winner came in the third period of Colorado's Game 7 victory over the Kings in the second round of the playoffs.

Later that night, when star center Peter Forsberg had to have emergency surgery to replace his spleen, the Avalanche put all of their hope in Drury to help replace their sidelined star.

Drury says he never felt any pressure to replace Forsberg and that he wanted to embrace the extra duty rather than hide from it.

"I think of it as a challenge," Drury says. "All I have to do is think about my friend, Travis, if I need a lift. The way I look at it, it could have been me. Maybe that has something to do with handling pressure. I don't care what game it is, even if it's the last game of the Stanley Cup, the pressure is nothing like what Travis goes through every day."

June 2001