Moments after the 2002 Olympic gold-medal game in Salt Lake City, Kalli Quinn, her sister, Val, and mother, Sandra, raced by startled security personnel to the Team Canada bench area just in time for the singing of "O Canada."
As the joyful Canadians posed for a team picture celebrating their country's first gold medal in men's hockey in 50 years, head coach Pat Quinn grabbed Kalli and brought his daughter out for the photo, a nod to her work as the family liaison during the Games.
In some of the photos, if the angle is just right, you can see Val and Sandy on the bench. To view the photo from that perspective is to understand Pat Quinn entirely. Family. Hockey. Country.
Kalli and the rest of the Quinn family no doubt will be reminded of that moment in Toronto this weekend when her father is inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. He joins Eric Lindros, Rogie Vachon and Sergei Makarov in the class of 2016.
It will be more than a little bittersweet for those whose lives were touched by the big Irishman from Hamilton, Ontario. Quinn, chairman of the Hall of Fame's selection committee in his later years, died two years ago at the age of 71.
Kalli figures she knows how her dad would react to the honor. Me? With those guys? No way.
"I've thought about it a lot," Kalli said. "To be recognized for doing something that he loved. ... It wasn't a job to him. It was something that he loved to do."
There were, in fact, many, many things that Pat Quinn put ahead of Pat Quinn.
"Guys who played for Pat Quinn all said the same thing," Wayne Gretzky said. "It was all good."
There was no more pressure-packed coaching job, perhaps in the history of the game, than coaching Canada at the '02 Olympics. Finding roles for each member of a roster brimming with future Hall of Famers was no small feat, yet Quinn handled the task with aplomb.
Calm in the face of turmoil? Indeed.
Canada lost its first game against Sweden 5-2, and an entire nation went into full panic mode. "We were all pretty down about it," recalled Gretzky, who was executive director of Canada's Olympic effort at the time.
Not Quinn.
In the days leading up to the Olympics, a popular commercial portrayed a bunch of Canadians going across the border into the United States with nothing to declare but a can of "Whup Ass." In Salt Lake City, Quinn took an aerosol can and taped over the label with a hand-drawn label reading "Whup Ass."
"And after that first game, I was standing there, we were all obviously devastated. And he said, 'Wayne, don't worry about it. I got a big old can of Whup Ass here," Gretzky recalled, laughing at the memory.
Canada would go on to defeat the United States in the gold-medal game, setting off one of the most spontaneous national celebrations in the country's history.
Bob Nicholson, the longtime head of Hockey Canada, first met Quinn when Nicholson was working in minor hockey in British Columbia and Quinn was with the Vancouver Canucks. Nicholson and Quinn became fast friends, often spending summers together sitting at the end of a B.C. dock drinking red wine and smoking the ever-present cigars that were as much a part of Quinn's persona as his great physical presence.
Nicholson recalled how, in the hours before the gold-medal game in 2002, Quinn suddenly dropped his trousers to show off the lucky underwear and socks his grandchildren had decorated for him -- and which he'd been wearing throughout the tournament. Neither Nicholson nor Gretzky could contain their laughter at the memory of the bedazzled garments.
"He was very proud of those," Gretzky added.
Ken Hitchcock was part of that same Olympic staff. He'd first met Quinn when Quinn was the general manager in Vancouver and Hitchcock was coaching in the Western Hockey League. After being invited to take part in Vancouver's training camp, Hitchcock got up at 3 a.m. and drove to the rink, expecting to be sharing the ice with other coaches -- only to find he was the only one out there with 40 players.
In the stands, Quinn and director of player personnel Brian Burke watched, bemused, as Hitchcock used up his entire repertoire of drills in about 25 minutes because the pace was so fast.
"They laughed about it for 10 years, those clowns," Hitchcock said.
The two lifelong coaches became pea-pod close, playing off each other as they shared some of the country's most memorable hockey moments, Quinn often referring to Hitchcock as a mad hockey scientist.
"He was such a good man," Hitchcock said. "Every day you came to work, you didn't want to let the man down."
The two stayed in close contact until Quinn's phone was turned off for the last time two years ago.
"It was really emotional for a lot of us," Hitchcock said of Quinn's death. "It was really hard."
Quinn played 606 NHL regular-season games for the Toronto Maple Leafs, Vancouver Canucks and Atlanta Flames, and was remembered for his hard-nosed style that included a bone-rattling check on Bobby Orr that made him a hated man in Boston for his entire career.
But it was in coaching and managing -- the science of team building, if you will -- where Quinn would make a lasting and undeniable impression.
Quinn coached five teams: the Philadelphia Flyers, Los Angeles Kings, Canucks, Maple Leafs and Edmonton Oilers, compiling a W-L-T-OTL record of 684-528-154-34. Jacques Martin coached his first game in the NHL against Quinn in 1986. Over the years their paths would cross many times, most notably in heated playoff confrontations between Quinn's Toronto Maple Leafs and Martin's Ottawa Senators.
But the two also worked together during international tournaments, and Martin fondly recalls end-of-day gatherings on the benches outside the Olympic village in Salt Lake City, where Quinn would contentedly draw on a cigar and talk hockey with the rest of the coaches.
"When I think of Pat, I just remember him as a person with a presence in the room, in a dressing room addressing players," Martin said. "A real classy individual. And a highly competitive individual. That's what drove him. He was really driven to win."
Kalli Quinn recalled the door to the Quinn home always being open to players, coaches, whoever wanted to drop by. Such was the sense of family that extended beyond the Quinn name.
Among those visitors during Quinn's successful coaching tenure in Philadelphia was rugged Philadelphia Flyers forward Paul Holmgren.
"He loved to teach so much that we literally had to go to him and say, 'Pat, you need to stop these teaching moments,'" Holmgren said.
"Two minutes, three minutes, now they're 10 minutes," Holmgren explained, chuckling. "You get a good sweat on, especially in those old practice rinks in those days. Now all of sudden you've got to stand there for 10 minutes and listen to Pat orate."
When Holmgren moved into coaching, he would often turn to Quinn for advice. "He was a huge help to me," Holmgren said. "I'm fortunate and I believe a better person because I did."
If there is a measure of the depth of Quinn's capacity to share his knowledge, it was in his successes with teams of top Canadian teens. He guided an under-18 national team and then the under-20 squad to championships late in his career.
Nicholson admitted no one was quite sure how Quinn would manage with the kids after spending so long with established NHLers. "To be honest, he scared the [crap] out of them first," said Nicholson. And then he got them to buy into his systems. "He was a teacher of skill but he was also a teacher of people."
Trevor Linden first met Quinn at the family home in British Columbia shortly before Vancouver made Linden the second-overall pick in 1988. He recalled being awed as his hand disappeared into Quinn's meaty palms during that first handshake.
Quinn, the team's GM, took on the coaching duties in Vancouver during the latter stages of the 1990-91 season. The Canucks advanced to the second round the following spring as Quinn earned his second Jack Adams Award as coach of the year. Then, two years later, in 1994, Quinn and the Canucks lost to the New York Rangers in a classic seven-game Stanley Cup finals.
"He made sense of things," said Linden, who is now president of hockey operations for the Canucks. "That's what he was great at. He taught me how to play the proper way."
Linden is roughly the same age Quinn was when the two first met, and there is something cyclical about Linden's role in trying to revive the fortunes and identity of the Canucks franchise. "There's a reason people like Pat so much in Vancouver," Linden said. "He's left an indelible mark on this franchise."
One might say that Quinn left an indelible mark on the entire game.