"For someone so exquisitely deft with his hands, Mats Sundin is suddenly all thumbs.

He jabs clumsily at the keypad of his smarty-pants phone. It's been buzzing incessantly. Swedish TV is demanding an on-camera interview. Officials from the University of Toronto need to confirm details for a press conference. Former teammates from out of town want to coordinate arrival times. Friends are checking in. There's a speech to write, nearly two dozen relatives and intimates to corral — the Sundin Travelling Posse from Sweden — and a wife, Josephine, who can't be ignored.

It's chaotic, this being honoured stuff.

And Sundin is, essentially, a simple man. Complications have never rested comfortably on his strapping 6-foot-5 frame. Some of us spent years searching in vain for layers of nuance, emotional clutter, concealed psychodrama, rather than accept there were no still waters running deep, no Scandinavian murk. "