Mario Lemieux’s final season of junior hockey — 133 goals and 282 points for the Laval Voisins in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League — was an unforgettable masterpiece.
Unless, of course, you’re Jacques Goyette.
Goyette was Lemieux’s first steady winger, his original Rob Brown. Goyette produced 76 goals and 170 points, finishing second behind Lemieux in both categories, then … retired.
While Lemieux became one of the NHL’s greatest players, Goyette, undrafted and unhappy, willingly walked away from the sport to become a police offer in Laval, Quebec, a job he still holds today.
“Life goes separate ways,” Goyette, 51, said by phone from his office on a lunch hour earlier this month.