Two decades after his immortal Little League victory, Chris Drury has become one of sports' greatest clutch players. Can he deliver a title to the losingest city in sports?

	Drury is the perfect Buffalo player, an embodiment of the city's self-image: hardworking, self-sacrificing, down to earth. Bill Wippert/SI

By S.L. Price

One minute to go. A booming voice in Mellon Arena announces this, and the delirious crowd roars. Really, can a March night get any better? The fans arrived buzzing with the news that their beloved Penguins had been saved when a last-minute deal for a new arena locked the NHL franchise into Pittsburgh for the next 30 years. Then Penguins great, team co-owner and now savior Mario Lemieux walked onto the ice and declared how proud he was that the Pens "will remain right here in Pittsburgh where they belong!" And then the game: swift and furious, score after score, months of tension dissolving in the din. Now the inspired team and its dazzling star, Sidney Crosby, hold a 4-3 lead over the Eastern Conference-leading Buffalo Sabres; now the old building shakes with civic love and joy and the adrenaline rush that comes from fans knowing they'll be able to say, decades on, that they were there for that historic scene. A banner declares, it's a great day for hockey!

What opponent could withstand such an emotional landslide? Truth be told, the Sabres' job this evening is to roll over, give Pittsburgh its well-deserved funfest and gracefully take the loss -- Oh, we ran into a buzz saw tonight.

Yet there's a problem. Buffalo is stuck in a season-high three-game losing streak. That needs to stop. Then there's the matter of Sabres center Chris Drury: pure poison for a moment like this. He's a soft-spoken, camera-shy, shortish guy who time and again has proved impervious to the pressures that make others want to hide; once, when his coach at Boston University, the legendary Jack Parker, asked after a particularly harrowing game whether he had been nervous, Drury, a junior, looked up and said quietly, "Oh, I never get nervous."

"I don't know anybody like him," says Sabres general manager Darcy Regier. Mike Eruzione, the 1980 Olympic hockey star who as an assistant at BU coached Drury, says, "He's not superskilled. He just wins."

Drury is, in fact, one of the greatest clutch players in sports. Ever. At 13 he led Trumbull, Conn., to its shocking win over mighty Taiwan in the 1989 Little League World Series, five months after helping his Greater Bridgeport Pee Wee hockey team win the '89 amateur national championship. Ever since, the wins and the honors have rolled in like boxcars: a state hockey title in high school, an NCAA title his freshman year at BU, the Hobey Baker Award as the nation's best hockey player, the Calder Trophy as the NHL's top rookie. Hardly a prolific scorer, Drury knocked in four playoff game-winning goals that first year for Colorado, and two seasons later, stepping out of the shadows of Joe Sakic and Peter Forsberg, he scored 11 goals in the Avalanche's 23-game playoff run to the 2001 Stanley Cup title. He has tallied 12 playoff game-winners -- one more than the great Lemieux -- and his four overtime goals in the postseason are tied for second most among active players. And Drury is only 30.

 

By S.L. Price

	Chris, sandwiched by Ted (left) and Jim, never sat for long as a kid. Courtesy of the Drury family

"You want a goal, you're in overtime -- you want him," says the 37-year-old Sakic, who holds the record for OT playoff goals, with seven. "He loves that time. His level of play rises." Drury isn't the only one in the NHL whose heart rate slows at such crucial moments, of course; he ranked second this season in game-winners, with nine. "But if you do a poll [of players, asking] who you'd want in that situation," Sakic says, "his would be the first name to come up. He's done it so often."

So those who know, wait. That game in Pittsburgh is nationally televised, so when the announcer on TV echoes the man in Mellon Arena and says, "Final minute of play here," the long-suffering natives lining bars along Buffalo's Elmwood strip pay attention. Hockey fans in Trumbull, Boston and Denver don't change the channel. And in a condominium not far from Fenway Park, a 31-year-old man named Travis Roy, pecking at his computer keyboard with a 14-inch stick held in his teeth, stops. He is paralyzed from the neck down, but there's a patch of life in his right biceps, just enough for Roy to move his right hand atop the joystick on his electric wheelchair. The weight of his hand depresses the stick. Roy jerks his arm back. He backs the chair up, then angles it slightly to the right, giving him a full view of the TV screen.

Let's see. That's how the thought drops into Roy's head this time. Let's see if Chris is going to do it again.

What makes a winner? Considering that this is sport's central question, the one agonized over by coaches, general managers, owners, parents and fans, considering how winners such as Yogi Berra and Michael Jordan are still revered, it's remarkable that even those who wear the label find the question difficult to answer. After an initial stab at familiar terms -- luck, confidence, hard work -- there comes the flutter of ums, a pause and then surrender: "I can't explain it," Sakic says of Drury. "I can't explain what he does."

Or in the words of Scotty Bowman, who won the Stanley Cup nine times as a head coach and, with the Red Wings, fell victim to Drury's overtime game-winner in Game 2 of the '02 Western Conference finals, "It's hard to describe. We had one in Detroit with [Steve] Yzerman; they're not big guys. You look at them game in, game out -- and you still don't know how they can do it."

 

By S.L. Price

	It was by imitating Drury (left) that Briere learned how to believe in himself -- and win. Bill Wippert/SI

In July 2003 the hard-luck Buffalo franchise -- still wincing over Brett Hull's skate-in-the-crease goal for Dallas that yanked the Cup away from the Sabres in 1999 -- had just emerged from bankruptcy. Revitalized by new owner Tom Golisano, Regier and Sabres managing general partner Larry Quinn made their first official move to upend the club's losing culture: They traded for Drury. That season the Sabres won 10 more games than the year before. Last season, despite a late plague of injuries, they came within 20 minutes of making the Stanley Cup finals. This season they set a franchise mark of 53 wins and finished with the best record in the NHL.

Many factors account for Buffalo's transformation from joke to juggernaut: Ryan Miller's emergence as one of the league's top goalies; center Daniel Briere's rise as an offensive force; management's fortuitous decision, two years before the NHL's new scoring-friendly rules kicked in, to build a team around speed and skill. The Sabres and coach Lindy Ruff produced four 30-goal scorers this season with an attack that's as tough as it is prolific. But at the center of it all is Drury, the team's co-captain and unquestioned leader, the player who sets the tone every night against opponents' top lines, the man whose résumé lifts this postseason to the level of high drama. Can one of sport's great winners do what no one else could? Will Drury deliver the first championship to the losingest city in America?

"If anybody can do it," says Blaise MacDonald, who helped coach Drury at BU, "Chris can."

But why? When the question is put to Drury, he can barely get the term out of the back of his throat: "Why I'm a ... a ... winner?" he says. He mentions the great programs he's been a part of, the players who've won with him. He speaks about his competitiveness. The topic makes Drury uneasy, as if examining such a thing will rob it of its power. "I'm thrilled that it happens," he says. "I'm thrilled that where I've been I've had success. I haven't won anything as a Sabre. I guess I don't know."

So let's put the pieces together, one by one. Let's start with the most underrated component of winners: love. A look at any Little League team will tell you that love in its purest athletic form -- of the ball, of the action -- is surprisingly rare. Kids play because their friends play or the uniforms are cool or Mom wants them outside. But in each group there's maybe one who has no choice, who must always be pounding his mitt or throwing a ball against a wall, who must simply move. Drury was that kid. His older brother Ted, who played eight years in the NHL and just finished his career in Germany, wasn't. Ted could actually sit still.

 

By S.L. Price

"Chris couldn't get through a meal," says Marcia Drury, his mom. "He'd take two or three bites -- and then he was gone. He'd be out shooting pucks or hoops or something."

Aside from his turbocharged makeup, Drury had other advantages. His mom and his dad, John, lived in a typical middle-class neighborhood, a little more than a mile from Trumbull's Unity Park and its ball field and only two miles from the ice rink. John's career as a financial adviser at UBS, and Marcia's as a customer-service rep for a retail company, provided enough money so that the four Drury kids had equipment and time to run free, but not enough to be overindulged; when Chris was off in Chicago winning that Pee Wee hockey title, his parents stayed home to work. Still, there was a big net in the backyard to catch slap-shot pucks or baseballs hit off a tee. There was aluminum siding on the house, pocked with sports dents. Street hockey in the driveway, Wiffle ball out back, bruises and fights: One day Chris and his best friend, Ken Martin, tussled over a foul ball and each ended up with a broken nose. And always, there was Ted, five years Chris's senior, setting the example and taking Chris along. At 10 Ted would bring his little brother to take part in his hockey games and baseball clinics, and when the adults would try to step in, Ted would say, "No, no, he can do it."

Ted went first to Fairfield Prep, where he attended class wearing ankle weights under his pants. He'd practice slap shots for hours every day, Rollerblade and lift weights in a pro-style regimen none of his peers were following. Connecticut is hardly top-flight hockey territory, and Ted knew it; Chris picked up that underdog ethos too. The brother between them, Jim, also played everything and later was a center on the hockey team at Division III Lake Forest College, but there's something about that oldest brother: Follow his lead, take him down. "Chris likes to win, and that part is Ted," Marcia says. "He wanted to better Ted. He was the role model, and the thing to beat."

Still, nothing marked Chris as extraordinary until the '89 Little League World Series. For a boy to hit .527 and go 8-0 in the preliminaries and at Williamsport, to toss a crafty complete-game five-hitter in the final, to drive in two runs in that 5-2 shocker over Kaohsiung, Taiwan, seemed the perfect foundation for a lifetime of winning. Taiwan had won three straight titles, outscoring the U.S. by 43-1. Drury still remembers hearing people chanting "U-S-A!" hours before game time, the feel and noise of 40,000 people surrounding him and watching every move. Mostly, though, he still sees the cocky Taiwanese players, just before the teams paraded onto the field. "I remember how casual and loose they were, like they already had it won," Drury says. "And I remember thinking, That's not right. This is not how it's going to be."

 

By S.L. Price

There's a moment in the third inning. Drury, leading off first base, dives back on a throw from the catcher; Taiwan's first baseman, a full head taller, steps on Drury's left hand while laying down the tag and leaves his foot there. Drury screeches "Get off me," scrambles to his feet and shoves another Taiwan player in the chest. The fact that, as the team's star, Drury was both pudgy and tough lent the Trumbull squad an irresistible Everyman quality, and the resulting whirlwind of fame would be enough to make even the most grounded kid lose his mind. Drury found himself pitching to his idol, Don Mattingly, at Yankee Stadium, shaking hands with President George H. W. Bush, taking a limousine ride into Manhattan for his appearance on Good Morning America, throwing the first pitch of Game 2 at the '89 World Series. When, a few weeks after the win, Drury toured Fairfield Prep, an older boy asked for his autograph. It was all too weird for a 13-year-old, and as his longtime friend Matt Sather, now Prep's hockey coach, puts it, "You're going to go one of two ways: become the star and embrace that kind of attention, or go into a shell and say, 'This isn't what I'm all about.'"

It helped that the family barely celebrated his feat; who had the time? All the kids were heading off to new schools that fall: Ted to Harvard, Jim to boarding school and Katie, the youngest, to junior high. Still, those close to Chris could sense his discomfort with the attention; having a national sports magazine -- Guilty! -- photograph his bedroom left him mortified. When, four years later, MacDonald recruited Chris to BU, little had changed: Instead of selling himself with his baseball exploits, Drury was almost embarrassed by them. When he got to BU a year later and filled out a questionnaire for the sports information department, he didn't mention Little League.

"I wouldn't change a thing," Drury says. "But as fun as it was, a lot of people were unhappy with our minicelebrity. There was some jealousy. Years later, I had parents say to me, 'That was the worst thing to happen in this town. Now every team thinks they have to win [the Little League World Series], and every parent is nuts.' For five, six, seven years after, I think everyone viewed it as a failure if they didn't win it. Which is absurd." In a sense, though, no one could understand better; Drury's ambition knew no limits. When his Pee Wee coach was quoted as saying that Chris had the talent to play in high school, "probably" in college and "then, we'll see," Drury used it as fuel: This is what he thinks?All right. After he helped Fairfield win the state title as a third-line freshman, he told Sather that they should gun to win four straight. Sather, a year older, tried to say it'd be O.K. to win just one or two more. "That always stuck in my mind as perhaps the difference between him and me," Sather says.

That, and the fact that Drury simply couldn't get enough hockey, especially after a broken right wrist derailed his baseball career in high school. The boys skated everywhere: rink, pond, even an iced-over drainage ditch near Unity Park. After hours and hours, Sather would try to beg off. But Chris would insist, "One more game, one more."

 

By S.L. Price

In the summer before his freshman year at BU, Chris joined Ted at the school, where his brother was taking part in a training camp for the 1994 U.S. Olympic hockey team. In one of the team's first four-mile runs, he chased Ted the entire way. Chris was hardly in shape, and when they hit the final hill, he started vomiting. Chris never broke stride. "He's throwing up as he's running, but he keeps running and keeps running," says Mike Boyle, BU's longtime strength and conditioning coach. "He runs right through the door where we always finish." Boyle asked if he was all right. Chris said yes, took a drink of water and walked off.

His big brother starred at Harvard, made first-team All-America, and when the Terriers played there during Chris's freshman year, the Crimson crowd chanted, "You're no Ted!" each time he touched the puck. Chris had been picked by the Quebec Nordiques in the third round of the 1994 entry draft, but no one thought of him as a sure thing. Seeing mostly fourth-line action during BU's 1994-95 NCAA title run, he made practice his proving ground. He threw himself into Boyle's hands, into the weight room; barely able to do one chin-up and back-squatting just 200 pounds as a freshman, Drury could regularly do 20 chin-ups and back-squat 400 by the time he graduated. His sophomore season, Drury all but tripled his production: 35 goals, 33 assists in 37 games.

"I had no idea he was going to get so much better so quickly, that his competitiveness would make him so special," says Parker, who has coached 19 Olympians and 54 future NHL players. "He's not the guy who wows you with speed or stickhandling or the hardest shot. But I don't think I've ever coached anybody as competitive. If you were to wake Chris up at three o'clock in the morning and tell him, 'We've got a pickup game,' when he'd get on the ice he'd have to beat you to that puck."

To this day Drury arrives at the rink two hours before practice. But what sticks with him most vividly about that sophomore season is what happened when Roy, a freshman just 11 seconds into his first shift at Walter Brown Arena, hurtled headfirst into the boards. Drury was three strides away when he heard the crack. Wow, Drury thought, someone just got drilled. He was the first to make it to Roy's side, to see his friend's head turned, as Roy says, "more than it should have been." The two had gotten to know each other at high school tournaments and all-star games; Roy had stayed with Drury on his recruiting visit. "We'd connected," Drury says. He thought Roy had only been knocked out. It was only after the game, when Drury watched doctors, a sports psychologist and a weeping Parker trudge into the locker room, that he thought the worst: Holy s---, Travis is dead.

No, Roy had suffered cracked fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae; he would never walk again. For a decade Drury hosted a golf tournament in Connecticut, raising more than $250,000 for Roy and his foundation for spinal cord survivors. They speak often; no former teammate, Roy says, keeps in closer touch. Drury says Roy is the one player in history he'd like to have played with. "There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of him," Drury says. "In good times and bad. If I have a rough game or the flight's delayed or I get a bad meal -- you know, little things that would drive anyone crazy? In my head I say, What do I have to complain about? This guy's been in a chair for 11 years."

It's his paradox: No player approaches the game more seriously, yet few better understand its relative unimportance. With Drury there's always the sense of a career, a life, held in delicate balance between intensity and calm, between the demands of fame and an almost aggressive humility. He has all his trophies, rings and awards, of course -- but he keeps them in storage.

 

By S.L. Price

One night during Drury's junior year, his friend John Ferguson drove up from Connecticut to take him home for Christmas vacation. BU had just beaten archrival Boston College 6-4, but Drury didn't talk about the game. The next morning Ferguson read in The Boston Globe that Drury had scored four goals.

Still, Drury fought with teammates who wouldn't match his fire in practice. He called out anyone he thought was dogging it. Once, as the players were doing sprints on stationary bikes, Drury sat next to a freshman who was just going through the motions. When the drill ended, Drury said, "If that's the way you're going to do it, why don't you get out of here right now?"

His need to keep celebrity at a distance remained just as extreme. Drury was a junior when he met his future wife, Rory, at T's Pub in Boston. It was after a 4-4 tie at BC; she was there with family. Drury, BU's star, approached her. He told Rory he had seen her at the game, neglecting to mention he had been playing. "She didn't want anything to do with me," Drury says. He followed her around the bar all night. Rory told him she was a freshman at Fairfield University, on the same campus as his old high school, and he jumped at the connection, throwing everything he knew at her. He tried charm. He tried to impress. But he never told her he played hockey.

When Drury went to get a napkin to take her number, Rory bolted. He caught her at the cab, begged her to give him her last name. "Manning," she said.

"Oh, like Peyton," he said.

"Peyton who?"

"I'll call you!" Drury said, slamming the cab door.

He called the next day, drove down to Fairfield the next weekend. With Ferguson and another friend he took Rory to dinner. They spent a few hours together, Drury talking about how he hoped to teach U.S. history, maybe coach baseball, after he graduated. No one mentioned hockey. During dinner he asked her to go with him to The Beanpot, Boston's storied annual four-college tournament. Two nights later she rode up in a van to Boston with Ferguson and three others. They got to their seats inside the Fleet Center, Rory figuring she'd meet up with her date then. "Where's Chris?" she said to Ferguson.

"Right there," he pointed.

Drury was out on ice, number 18. He didn't wave. He never even looked up.

In the lobby of Buffalo's grand old City Hall, on a lone easel near the elevators leading up to the mayor's office, a large and dramatic sign has been sending out a message for the last eight years. Greater Buffalo, it says proudly, has been declared an "All-America City." But the bulk of the poster is taken up by two more elusive symbols. First a picture of the Super Bowl trophy, and beneath it two words: need it. Then the Stanley Cup and the same plea: need it.

 

By S.L. Price

That such desperation is shouted from the official heart of Buffalo, and not the wall of some sports bar, says plenty about the place of sports -- and the resurgent Sabres -- in the life of the city. "We think, and many people think, that the town needs to win a major sports championship," says Mayor Byron Brown. "To correct the inferiority complex in the psyche in the community."

The body blows suffered by Buffalo over the last five decades are a staple of Rust Belt lore: shuttered steel mills and empty grain silos shadowing the shores of Lake Erie; an exodus of young people in search of work; half the city's citizens drained away, taking Buffalo's status as an urban power with them. The Sabres lost the Stanley Cup finals in 1975 and '99, and in between the Bills lost four straight Super Bowls. Scott Norwood's wide-right kick in the 1991 Super Bowl and Hull's illegal goal became emblematic of Buffalo's fate: to fail or to get jobbed, to lose ignominiously, again and again. "Loss of jobs, loss of opportunity, loss of population, loss of four Super Bowls in a row, losing the Stanley Cup like we did?" Brown says. "It was a combined feeling of, We're sinking."

"This town has a lot to offer," Quinn says. "I can't stand it: Every time someone comes in, they write about how dirty it is, or how the buildings are empty. We're all working hard to fix it. But there's a sense of embarrassment and a lack of confidence. Are we as good as everybody else?"

That's why, when you visit Buffalo, you almost never bump into anyone who says he doesn't care about sports. That's why Buffalo running back Willis McGahee, recently traded to Baltimore, was a goner the moment in January that he suggested the NFL move the Bills to Toronto. That's why the official message boards at the airport scream go sabres! in midseason, why Buffalo jerseys dominate the NHL top ten list, why two groups of fans tried to pay Ruff's $10,000 NHL fine for retaliating for the savage hit Ottawa forward Chris Neil laid on Drury on Feb. 22. "What's Lindy make -- $650,000?" says Deputy Mayor Steven Casey. "Here are guys making $25,000 a year showing up to give him money."

Because there is an urgency now. It has been a long time since a Buffalo team has been this good, and fans know that Drury and Briere, the team points leader, are free agents at the end of this season. The Sabres may not be able to keep both. Losing early in the playoffs -- let's face it, losing at all -- could send the town into a tailspin. "The Sabres and the Bills are the city," says Tim Russert, Buffalo native and host of NBC's Meet the Press. "They give it life."

Russert, Mayor Brown, most anyone in town will say that Drury is the perfect Buffalo player, an embodiment of the city's self-image: hardworking, self-sacrificing, down to earth. But Buffalonians, as MacDonald, who coached at nearby Niagara University, says, "can also feel sorry for themselves. Woe is me, Scott Norwood, Brett Hull, why does this always happen to us? Chris is the anti of that mentality. He never feels sorry for himself and his team. He doesn't look in the past, no pity parties. Nope. Next play."

That, of course, is what Buffalo is counting on. "This is it! Brother Drury is bringing us to the mountaintop!" Russert shouts. "There's a sense of mission. He has proved he knows how to win championships and he is the leader." Then he pauses.

 

By S.L. Price

"Let's hope," Russert says, his voice dropping almost to a whisper. "One time."

Blood on the ice: Neil bulled into Drury's left shoulder. The Sabres led the Senators 3-2 in the second period of that February game, but suddenly the score didn't matter. The force of the collision popped Drury's helmet off like the shell of a cracking walnut. Drury flew into the air, three feet above the rink surface, and nearly flipped, his skates rising for an instant above his head. His face crashed into the ice, opening a two-inch gash in his right eyebrow. He lay still a moment, concussed, tried to take a knee and fell. Blood dribbled down. The home crowd howled, Buffalo's Drew Stafford attacked Neil, the head coaches screamed at each other. After the ensuing face-off every player, including the goalies, paired up and started to swing.

No matter which Sabres player had been hit, punches would've been thrown; in hockey it's all about defending the sweater. But there's no doubt that the Buffalo response "was amplified," says then Sabres goalie Martin Biron (since traded to Philadelphia), "because it was Chris Drury lying on the ice."

It's telling that in the weeks after, when everyone in Buffalo was calling Neil a cheap-shot artist and the NHL took the usual heat for its thuggery, the low-key voice on the issue was Drury's. He refused to say whether he thought the hit was dirty. He talked about being more careful. Pulling a Braveheart would've been the easy way to fire up his team for the stretch run. But that's not Drury's way. "He's never going 100 miles an hour, then 50, then 100," Regier says, moving his hand in a steady slow line. "He's always at 60. He does not quit, but that doesn't mean, I WILL NOT QUIT! It's, I do not quit. It's all quiet. There is no flash. There's just the constant movement. So you look at that and say, I wonder if he can teach that?"

Before Drury joined the Sabres -- acquired from the Flames -- the locker room music stayed on loud and long before games, and no one hit the weight room after. Drury walked in his first day and turned off the stereo. "I thought, What's wrong with this guy?" says Buffalo defenseman Brian Campbell. Late during an exhibition game in 2003, one rookie teammate fired off a sloppy pass that led to a scoring chance for the opponents. They didn't score. The Sabres led by four goals. Drury still chewed the rookie out, and when the player retorted that it was only preseason, Drury said, "I don't care. Don't ever do that again." He made a point of sidling up to Miller, then a rookie unsure of how to challenge Biron, and said, "You going to take this job or what?"

"It made me feel like it was O.K. to do what I needed to do," Miller says.

The players knew Drury's history. Everyone began watching how he prepared, stretched, made sure to eat the blandest food to guard against stomach upset. One by one after games, they began hitting the weights. They saw how he still loved the action, how he has to score during practice drills, how, even after Miller blocks his shot, Drury will hover around the net waiting for the puck: just one more shot. And they began to know that the player with the most remarkable résumé refused to consider himself remarkable at all. "I'm not extraordinary," Drury says. "I have to work extremely hard because that's how I'm going to succeed. If I coasted or put on weight or didn't work on my game in the summer or didn't lift, I'd take a step back. I would never say, 'I'm good enough.' There's not time enough in the day for me to work on stuff I need to work on."

Quietly, and in perfect concert with Briere, Drury took hold of the locker room. As the team started to win last season, Drury gradually let the music play later and later. He asked that the club put a picture of the Stanley Cup on the wall, to remind everyone what they're playing for. He protected the team from distractions, shutting down an in-game conversation this season between a local TV personality and a trainer, even barring Quinn from entering the locker room one morning because the team was about to meet. "I don't know any former captains who would've said that to me," Quinn says. "But I loved that. It's his room."

 

By S.L. Price

Drury racked up a career-high 37 goals and 69 points this season, but while he has improved his offensive production, he hasn't slacked off in the categories -- face-offs, power plays, blocked shots, penalty-killing -- that win games but never awards.

Nobody, perhaps, has benefited more from Drury's presence than Briere, acquired from Phoenix late in the 2002-03 season. The 29-year-old Quebecois grew up in a hockey breeding ground but -- despite a 60-point season with the Coyotes in 2001-02 -- could barely convince himself he belonged in the NHL. But he began copying Drury's game-day routine, picked his brain, imitated his calm during tight moments. He learned what it takes to win.

"He's taught everybody around the room a lot about it -- when the game's on the line, how to step up," says Briere, the 2007 All-Star Game MVP who scored two overtime game-winners in last spring's playoffs. "Believing that you're the player who's going to make a difference is the beginning of everything."

That ability -- to win and to know how to make it contagious -- is rare, of course, and the irony in Drury's case is that his gift grew out of the most average conditions. His career is a triumph of the normal. He and Rory have two children. He does no commercials or photo shoots, has no signature goal celebration, speaks sparingly to the media. He absorbed early the values of hard work, excellence and loyalty and never deviated. Why? Because they worked. They paid off early. Chris Drury won, and then kept winning.

"I do think when it happens once, you draw on it," Ted Drury says. "And it happens again, you have two things to draw on, and it keeps happening, and you have more to draw on. Then you come to this random game against Pittsburgh in the middle of March and there's seven seconds left -- and now he's got so much to draw on that he's feeling pretty good."

Twenty seconds to go. The Sabres have pulled Miller, and Drury has the puck in his own end, bringing it up ice. The crowd is screaming, the seconds are flying, but Drury betrays no urgency. Earlier, with 1:43 left in the second period, he set up an easy goal to tie things 2-2, when he faked a shot, then waited, waited, waited until the last moment to feed Dmitri Kalinin at the top of the crease. When every instinct says, Rush! Force it! he doesn't. Now Drury flicks the puck to winger Jochen Hecht, who dumps it into the Pittsburgh end for the final push.

Nine seconds. In his condo Travis Roy doesn't take his eyes off the screen. Watching Drury play stirs in Roy a feeling almost nothing else can. One reason, of course, is that Drury has made Roy a part of his career; after Colorado won in 2001, Drury had a party on Boston's South Shore and made a point of placing the Stanley Cup in Roy's lap. But Roy also sees some of what he might have been in Drury: not the talent, not his career or life, but the refusal to take any of it for granted. After his accident Roy spent a lot of time around the BU program. "And I'd be watching these blue-chip recruits come in," he says. "So many got satisfied. It pissed me off. They have this opportunity at a top college. My whole goal in life was to see how good I could be. I just wanted to put myself in a position: Could I compete? I can't imagine I would ever have gotten satisfied."

Roy , of course, has his days. "I have a good quality of life, but the highs and lows? I'm not the happiest kid," he says. "I've got things I look forward to, but they're not nearly as prominent as they were before my accident. But when I watch Chris and see him score a big goal? I have a smile on my face."

The seconds are dwindling: 8.9 seconds ... 8.6.... When Drury sees Briere jabbing at the puck behind the net, he glides, almost lackadaisically, across the Pittsburgh crease: 8.5 ... 8.4 ... 8.3.... Briere knows without seeing that Drury will be there. "He's always in the right spot," he says. "It's amazing. You can always count on Chris when the game's on the line." Drury, meanwhile, is barely thinking: no hope, no fear, no worry about whether he'll score or not.

"In some ways it's already been decided," Drury says. "Mentally and physically, if you're prepared and you make your move, you make what you think is a good shot. If it doesn't go in, it wasn't meant to be. There's not much sense in fearing that."

Briere digs the puck loose and finds a seam, drills it to his man in front of the goal. With seven seconds left in regulation, Drury snaps it under the lunging leg of goalie Marc-Andre Fleury. Red light: Shock ripples through the building. The 4-4 tie will force overtime, Buffalo will lose in a shootout, but it doesn't matter. The Sabres will escape the cauldron with a point, Drury will score the winning goal two nights later in Florida, Buffalo will win four of its next five games. His team's small skid ends here.

The Sabres know it. Briere grabs Drury in a crushing hug and spins him around -- "Two little girls dancing in a corner," Briere says after, laughing -- their momentum slamming Drury against the boards. His eyes widen in surprise, and for the first time all night his intensity dissolves; his mouth forms a big U. Indeed, Drury is wearing the same expression he had on his face 18 years ago, when that last ball was caught on a field in Pennsylvania and all his friends piled on top of him. Winners don't change. When he does what he does, it puts a smile on Chris Drury's face too.