"Forty minutes before his official retirement speech, Mighty Joe Sakic sat in the Inverness Hotel's green room, which was painted gray, and took a bite out of a turkey sandwich and his life. Joe's wife, Debbie, was to his left, and his friend and longtime teammate Adam Foote to his right. His son Mitchell and the twins, Chase and Kamryn, as kids are wont to do, were all over the place. An intrepid intruder interrupted. "You looking for scoops?" Debbie laughed. "No, I'm looking for the buffet. Hi, Joe. What's new?" I asked. "I'm retiring," Joe said. "I've heard. But, then, you've always been shy and retiring, Quoteless Joe," a nickname I tagged him with 14 years ago. He will not be, let's face it,

confused for Will Rogers. More like Roy Rogers, the strong, silent type. "I'll give you a scoop," Joe said. STOP THE PRESSES! "At the last game at the arena, I looked up at the Jumbo-Tron, and they showed the back of my head. Everybody could see that I had a bald spot. You can't play hockey with a bald spot, so I'm hanging up the skates." Quoteless Joe finally said hello with a good quote as he said goodbye. Joe gave me a bunch more scoops, but not a sandwich, before he walked over to the conference room to face the live TV cameras, the media parasites, the young Avalanche (Matt Duchene appears), his old teammates ("Goose" Gusarov reappears) and the speech he dreaded to give, not because he hadn't fully made up his mind to retire, but because Joe would prefer three pucks and two fists in the face from the Red Wings to talking about himself. • Sakic, born and bred near Vancouver, British Columbia, to be a hockey icon, will live permanently in Denver. "I love Colorado. This is our home," he said. Like John - the only other professional athlete who belongs in the same sentence with Joe (who also will become the first career player on his Denver team in the Hall of Fame) - Sakic came, saw, conquered and chose to stay. "The time of year I love the weather the most here is the fall, and I've never really gotten to experience the mountains and Denver in the fall because I was always playing and traveling. We've already planned our first fall," he said. • Sakic would like to rejoin the Avalanche in a management (not coaching) position. He wants to be a hockey executive, just like the player he idolized, Wayne Gretzky, and just as John wanted to be a football executive. Sakic probably will one day be his former team's vice president/general manager, a role John never got with his former team, and possibly club leader for the Canadian Olympic team. Avs president Pierre Lacroix came into the room as Sakic said"