Canada's Sidney Crosby skates by during World Cup of Hockey action against the Czech Republic in Toronto on Sept. 17, 2016.Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press
The history of Sidney Crosby and Patrice Bergeron goes back to 2005, when the 17-year-old Crosby – then a precocious, though still undrafted prospect – was put on a line with Bergeron, a greybeard of 19, but with a full NHL season under his belt, to play for Canada in the world junior tournament.
It was the year of the NHL lockout and it gave Canada access to an unprecedented collection of teenage talent, many of whom remain fixtures on the international scene more than a decade later.
During that fortnight in North Dakota, Crosby will tell you, he was like an eager kid, quizzing Bergeron all about the life of an NHL pro, mining him for as much information as possible.
As a player, Crosby was (and is) like that still – a believer in lifetime learning, someone who thinks he can become incrementally better, even if he is mostly acknowledged by his peers as the best player in the world.
"If you're a young kid watching how to play hockey, that's the way you do it," said Canadian goaltender Carey Price, after Crosby showed off some of that best-in-class pedigree Saturday night in Canada's World Cup opener, a 6-0 rout of the Czech Republic. It was a game that was over in the 27 1/2 minutes it took Crosby to register three points, put up a plus-four rating and also demonstrate an attention to back-checking that would have made Bob Gainey proud.
"It looks like Sid is basically carrying in to this tournament from the Stanley Cup final," centre Jonathan Toews said. "It's like he hasn't gotten off the ice."
It was a short summer for Crosby, after he led the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Stanley Cup championship for the second time in his career. Here, at the World Cup, he is being ably abetted by Bergeron and Brad Marchand, two thirds of the Boston Bruins' top line.
Together, Crosby and Bergeron have won lots over the past decade since forging that early partnership as teenagers – two Olympic gold medals, plus a world junior championship.
But Marchand, who also contributed three points in the win over the Czechs, has a history with Crosby that, in a circular way, goes back further than Bergeron's.
Marchand is from Halifax; Crosby is from nearby Cole Harbour. And they are only a year apart. Accordingly, they probably would have played lots against each other as kids – except that Crosby was so dominant at such an early age that he always played with older players.
But within Halifax minor-hockey circles, Crosby's reputation was established early, the same way Wayne Gretzky's was in Brantford, Ont., decades earlier.
The first time Marchand actually watched Crosby play a game, he estimates Crosby was about 8.
"You'd hear about this kid that was very dominant," Marchand said. "Every year I was supposed to play against him, but he'd move up, because he was that good.
"I remember the first game I watched him play, it was 6-1 and he had five goals and an assist. He's always been a dominant player at every age. You knew he was going to be a great player."
Marchand and Crosby have had some pitched Stanley Cup playoff battles against one another, but they have also forged a friendship off the ice during the past few years. Nowadays, they skate together in the off-season in Halifax and have got to know each other as people.
"Obviously, we're both competitive people, so it comes out a bit in the playoffs," Marchand said.
That competitiveness also came out against the Czechs, where Canada's performance was a clinic on some levels. It was almost exactly the same game plan developed and executed so effectively in the gold-medal win in Sochi – the same meticulous attention to detail; the same high-end talent willing to play lesser roles to advance the greater good; and the same collective buy-in to coach Mike Babcock's system, in which Canada really doesn't give up much defensively.
Canada won the Olympics in 2014 by recording back-to-back shutouts over the United States and Sweden – and started this tournament off the way it ended the last one. So the shutout streak, if there is such a thing in best-on-best hockey, almost goes back four games to a quarter-final win over Latvia.
The good news for fans of the Montreal Canadiens: Early on, when the Czechs were still energetic and confident, Price was as good as ever, vacuuming up loose pucks when the team occasionally got a little sloppy.
It doesn't seem like a fair fight at this stage, though Babcock was cautious, noting how momentum can ebb and flow.
"The team that loses today usually gets better tomorrow, and the team that wins today usually gets a little fatter tomorrow," Babcock said. "The important thing to do is just live scared and get better tomorrow."
Significantly, both Crosby and Bergeron had their careers temporarily derailed by concussions some years ago. When that happened, the two used each other as sounding boards, as they worked through the long and sometimes uneven recovery period.
Some, from the outside, even counselled Crosby to retire, sit on his millions and not risk further injury. Instead, both took the necessary time to heal properly and are humming along, at the top of their respective games.