CRANBERRY TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- Carl Hagelin is fast.
He's got thighs like redwoods, a borderline-bowlegged gap in his gait that's strikingly common among hockey's greatest skaters, and he's got a lighter, lithe torso that's sturdy enough for high-level endurance, allowing him to whiz about the rink in a way that looks ... well, far too effortless to have been taught.
"You can't teach that, man. You just can't," Trevor Daley was musing the other day after the Penguins' practice at the Lemieux Complex. "You come out of the womb with that."
That's probably fair, at least to the extent that DNA dictates all of our paths.
But six days ago in Washington, following an uplifting victory over the NHL's No. 1 team, as most of his mates had long since packed up, there was Hagelin in a corridor outside the locker room, riding one of two stationary bikes, with Sidney Crosby on the other.
Then Kris Letang.
Then Oskar Sundqvist, the rookie.
Then ... hey, where'd everyone go?
"You never stop," Hagelin explained as I just stood there watching, already packed and ready to leave myself. "You can never stop. You just keep going."
He was always fast, maybe even out of the womb. But not this fast.
As a child growing up in Sweden, in the Stochkholm suburb of Sodertalje, he was outracing all the other kids. But never by enough. He worked out, often alone in a school gym, with a focus on leg strength. He'd stretch. He'd jump in place. He'd emphasize quickness via speed ladder. He'd run and bike, too.
And he'd skate.
"There's no substitute for the ice. You can do all those other things, and they're important. But when you're on the ice, you've got to go all out. Every time. Game, practice, whatever. Hockey is played on ice. You've got to be able to skate."
I've covered nearly a dozen NHL Drafts and, for all the fancy stats and fuss about character and all else that's entered the evaluation process, one trait still towers above all: As Mark Kelley, the Penguins' old European scout, once told me on the floor, "We can talk all we want about shooting, passing, grit, toughness ... sorry, but it still comes down to whether or not you can skate. Because if you can't skate, none of the other things will ever matter."
Heck, Hagelin's been flying even when he leaves his skates:
It's about speed. It's still the foundation of the world's fastest sport.
And when the Penguins and Rangers meet in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup playoffs Wednesday night at Consol Energy Center, these rivals battling for a third consecutive spring, it's immensely likely that speed will define everything about the outcome.
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