For years they had been inseparable, off the ice and on the ice, where they made magic as sweet as any set of NHL matched-pair wingers have in a very, very long time, and in the mind’s eye of the hockey universe.
But after a while, Patrik Elias yearned for independence from his friend Petr Sykora; yearned to be known as an independent entity and for his own identity. He had, after all, earned that.
And so it was early in the 2002-03 season that I approached Elias, whom I had known since he first joined the Devils as a 19-year-old back in 1995.