An all-time classic, The Game continues to stand apart, just like its author

Former Montreal Canadien Ken Dryden takes part in the team's centennial celebrations in 2009.

Imagine Neil Armstrong had been a poet, and came back from the Apollo 11 mission with just the right words to capture our place in the cosmos.

That’s what it meant, for Canada, to have Ken Dryden on the 1970s Montreal Canadiens. Under normal circumstances we would never know what it was like to play for the greatest hockey team of all time; that particular experience of touching the heavens would remain locked away in the relatively unpoetic minds of Steve Shutt and Jacques Lemaire.

Instead, we had Dryden in the space capsule of that locker room, and The Game as the immortal testament of what it was like. By common consensus one of the finest sports books of all time – Sports Illustrated once