Lincicome: The eyes of Chicago are upon you, Connor Bedard

We're talkin' hockey. We're talkin' history.

Game on. Light the lamp. Top shelf. Bury the biscuit. Cold steel on ice. Toothless and ruthless. Got stick? That hockey.

Maybe no other sport has quite the variety and bluntness of language as ice hockey, my favorite T-shirt summary of the sport being, “If You Die, We Split Your Gear.” Although my preferred bumper sticker is “My Son Cross-Checked Your Honors Student.”

And now we welcome two new words. Connor. Bedard.

You may have heard of him, Blackhawk, baby face, quick shot, shiftier than a landlord, faster than a sneeze, Chicago igniter.

That last one I lifted from his introduction to those of us who would have otherwise allowed the kid to slip on and off the ice as hockey players tend to do, melding into the Where's Waldo of sports.

Still, we did not expect him to emerge from ghostly iconographs of Gretzky, Jordan, Brady, LeBron and, I think, Sidney Crosby, with music welling and baritone rising while, I believe that was the Milky Way, some galaxy or other, ready to burst into a Big Bang eruption so that there is no mistake about what is expected of the lad.

“Bedard ignites Chicago's rebirth,” Mr. Baritone says, mindful that fire and the city are forever linked.

Blame it on TV for not missing a chance to make hockey more than it is, which is, as I said before, the game that not even Peter Puck could juice. ESPN, the guilty network, proudly announced that Bedard's first appearance boosted ratings to an all-time high, 1.43 million, or to put it in perspective, mixed martial arts numbers.

Surely, hockey and in particular the Blackhawks need someone to be what Bedard is already assumed to be, the great redeemer of the irredeemable, the savior of the unsavable, the next great thing, you know, like the aforementioned Jordan, et. al.

I do remember the first game of Jordan, against Washington when they were still called the Bullets, in creaky Chicago Stadium, where the dressing dungeon was downstairs, Jordan had hair, wore short pants and the old hall was more than half full for a change.

Jordan scored 16 while Orlando Woolridge and Quintin Dailey did the heavy lifting. No trumpets, not even any television, local or beyond. No baritones intoning “across the great universe lies one galactic threat in sports, the power of stars. Gravity and stars supply the success and wonder of our lives,” or some such thing. I might have missed a gasp or two in the retelling.

Hockey has had two great moments, the Miracle on Ice in Lake Placid about which some will still insist that the USA beating the Soviets was the beginning of the end of the cold war. World politics and ice hockey, go figure.

The other moment was “Slap Shot,” the greatest sports movie of them all, Paul Newman and the Hansen Brothers, puttin' on the foil. Ah, not “Brian's Song” nor “Bull Durham” can touch it.

And now “saddled with expectations not to be a minor star but a major one, look skyward to find Connor Bedard.”

Never in Chicago sports has there been such preliminary hoo-haw, not for Jordan, not for Patrick Kane, not for Walter Payton, not for Dick Butkus, not for Ernie Banks, not for Justin Fields, though those echoes have yet to fade.

This is what Bedard must face, to “light the next generations because that is the power of stars.”

I must admit Bedard does seem unfrazzled by it all, still the cheery teenager, as I also recall Tiger Woods once was, maybe a fair comparison in hype to Bedard. Though time, toil and attention turned Woods into the sour recluse he became, luckily for Bedard it is only hockey.

Hockey is a local story and not always that. It is not easy to leap from the ice to the clouds, even with all the redundant and disturbing attacks on simple privacy these days.

Think of hockey and you might think of Gretzky or Gordie Howe or maybe Bobby Orr, not many legends beyond the game they played.

If Bedard can become, oh, Eddie Olczyk, that will be good enough, anything to get us talkin' hockey.