I was a bit of a weird kid.

While it was certainly not unusual to grow up in small-town Canada loving hockey, I was the only regular participant in the ball hockey games on Cobourg’s Willow Crescent who was more fixated on NHL transactions than trying to improve his wrist shot.

In fact, from as far back as I can remember — age five or six, by the recollection of my parents — I would tell anyone willing to listen that I was going to grow up to be a hockey reporter.

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It would have been far more sensible to set my sights on becoming a hockey player at that stage of life, or maybe an astronaut or fireman or basically anything else.

You can actually see how perplexed my Grade 1 teacher Mrs. Maloney was with her pupil’s obsession based on the comments she left at the bottom of the entries in my writing journal.

“You sure like to write about hockey!”

“Good, can you now tell me about something else?”

“Can you write about another idea now?”

There must have been a touch of relief when the year ended and she got to pass me off to a Grade 2 teacher. However, Mrs. Maloney did send me home with a backhanded compliment near the top of my report card that June.

“Christopher has been writing daily,” she reported. “He often writes about sports even when encouraged to tell about other experiences he has.”

Those formative years help explain why I ended up focusing so much of my energy on gaining entry to journalism school and moving to Toronto. They also offer some context into why I eventually found myself standing across from a building then known as the Air Canada Centre just so that I could watch the reporters walk through Gate 2B on days that the Maple Leafs called a big news conference.

What it always comes back to is a burning desire to know how things truly work in the NHL.

Why contracts are structured in a certain way or how trades come together. What players or coaches are really like. How they handle pressure and where they find motivation. The logistics behind how teams travel, when they practice and why they operate the way they do. Even less consequential matters like how reporters interact with each other and who asks what kind of questions at news conferences.

Seeking those answers lies at the core of how I’ve approached every day of a career that’s now spanned a little more than half of my life, and it’s why I’m so thrilled today to announce that I’m joining The Athletic for what I hope is the most enriching professional chapter of them all.

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We’re talking about a company that already employs my favorite writers and now sees its work published in The New York Times. Without a shadow of a doubt, this is the best place a sportswriter could hope to call home.

We’re long past the days when a new hire needs to explain “Why I joined The Athletic.”

If that isn’t already self-evident, you’re probably not paying attention to the declining state of the industry in literally every other corner.

What has me most excited about this new job is the chance to tell stories about 32 different teams. To provide behind-the-scenes information and weigh in on the biggest issues of the day alongside esteemed colleagues like Pierre LeBrun, Michael Russo and Mark Lazerus. I’m hoping this role will lead to opportunities to tag team on stories with a promising stable of younger writers that includes Harman Dayal, Julian McKenzie, Shayna Goldman, Peter Baugh and Dom Luszczyszyn, and might eventually include some enterprise work with the heaviest hitters: Katie Strang, Dan Robson and Ian Mendes.

When you look up and down this lineup, The Athletic is brimming with immense talents.

I feel incredibly fortunate to now find myself among them.

Truth be told, even the little kid with big dreams couldn’t have imagined a career quite like this one way back when.

I saw Sidney Crosby score the Golden Goal from the lower-bowl media tribune seating to end the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and spoke to him on the ice each of the three nights he accepted the Stanley Cup from NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. I was there when Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals suffered a heartbreaking Game 7 overtime loss at Madison Square Garden in 2015 and then watched them parade the Cup out of T-Mobile Arena and onto the Las Vegas Strip after finally slaying their demons a couple of years later.

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I was in the press box the night Auston Matthews made his four-goal NHL debut in Ottawa. I saw Connor McDavid face his idol, Crosby, for the first time in Pittsburgh. I was on the edge of my seat while Team North America stole the show at the 2016 World Cup of Hockey. I stood on King Street in Cobourg when Justin Williams paraded the Stanley Cup and Conn Smythe Trophy through our hometown.

Heck, I was even one of roughly 250 people able to be inside Edmonton’s Rogers Place during the 2020 pandemic playoffs when Steven Stamkos scored a magical goal on one of the five shifts he was healthy enough to take that summer.

But do you know what’s best of all?

As I take on this new role with The Athletic, I’ll be walking through that media door at Scotiabank Arena for Connor Bedard’s first NHL game in Toronto tonight.

This sport forever offers a new story to tell.

Something else to figure out, to dig in on and to discover.

(Graphic: Eamonn Dalton)