Today the famous Crosby family dryer is in a storage unit, belatedly protected by layers of bubble wrap, kept in the dark under lock and key.
It’s been unseen for years, after the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame closed during the pandemic. The museum’s prized exhibit, which a young Sidney Crosby dented and dinged while practicing his shot in the basement of the modest, tidy Cole Harbour home where his parents still live, should re-emerge this summer, when a massive renovation is finally complete.
The dryer will be unwrapped and pushed into its place in the literal heart of the newly built hall, part of the Scotiabank Centre, home of the Halifax Mooseheads and other hopefuls. It will be backstopped by a curved sheet of hockey glass and surrounded by towers of pucks, like the beads of an abacus — one for each NHL goal he’s scored, 645 and counting.
The pucks are waiting in cardboard boxes, already stacked in place.
The dryer, for now, remains locked away.
Bruce Rainnie, the hall’s president, remembers a different time, when a steady parade of tourists would disembark from cruise ships and make the long walk up the hills of Halifax to stand in front of a battered home appliance.
“It was like a pilgrimage to Mecca,” he said. “You’d see people coming up in their Pittsburgh jerseys with No. 87 on them, with their cameras, to get their picture beside the dryer. I’m talking thousands of people. It was incredible.”
A blue plaque was mounted above the dryer, as though it were another of Halifax’s historic sites. “It would be surprising if another dryer of equal notoriety even existed,” the plaque read, just in case anyone might have debated where it ranked among notorious dryers.
A second sign requested that visitors not touch or open this one. A plastic shield eventually went in front of it, because too many of Crosby’s admirers couldn’t resist running their fingers over it, as though its pockmarks and puck scuffs contained a secret message, hidden lessons in greatness and how it begins.
There was still so much mystery about him then, his hockey more promise than fact.
The new exhibit will tell a fuller story, his career’s accounting nearly complete. Sid the Kid is now 38 years old, the ninth-oldest player in the NHL. He’s about to captain Canada at his third Winter Olympics.
It will probably be his last.
“Honestly, I hope it’s not,” Crosby said in an exclusive interview with CBC Sports. “But if it is, I hope I can make the most of this great opportunity.”
why does this have 32k notes? it’s just a picture of a knife in a ranch bottle, is there some unspoken joke that 32 thousand people share? what is going on here, i dont get it. it’s just a fucking picture of a knife in a ranch bottle. is there some spiritual connection people have to this picture? is there some ominous and mystical reasoning that this has 32 thousand notes? do people reblog this because it makes them look like some indie blogger? or is there just something funny to this? someone please explain
no one tell him
This is it, lads. The post that started us on this path 9 years ago.
I sure hope no one told him.
[ID: a photo of a knife stabbed into a bottle of Classic Caesar ranch dressing. End ID]
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