There is a quote that I have been unable to verify via the Internet, but that I very distinctly remember. One season during the heyday of the Pat Quinn Leafs, where the team made the playoffs regularly and even won sometimes when they got there, they reached a Game 7. Scoring forward Alex Mogilny was asked about the pressure he was feeling, and Mogilny put things into perspective with some of the things he’d been through in his life, including defecting from the Soviet Union. That, he said, was pressure. “This is a game.”
I’ve often thought about that quote.