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It ended messily amid rage and recriminations for the man known to many Quebeckers as Saint Patrick, but all is to be put right on Saturday evening at the Bell Centre.

That's when the Montreal Canadiens will retire Hall of Fame goaltender Patrick Roy's number, 33, at a game against the Boston Bruins, a team the tempestuous, intensely competitive Roy loved to hate as a player.

"I'm a guy who keeps his emotions inside, so it's going to be a big challenge for me," Roy said yesterday, adding the ceremony will have special meaning because "this is where it all started."

It's an event that hardly seemed possible after a bitter split with the organization that drafted Roy in 1985, and with which he won two of his four Stanley Cup championships and became the youngest player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoffs' most valuable player.

The NHL's career leader in wins — and the only man to win the Conn Smythe three times — was unceremoniously traded from Montreal to the Colorado Avalanche in 1995 after a rift with Canadiens management exploded into public view during a drubbing at the hands of the Detroit Red Wings.

"You always have regrets, I mean, nobody's perfect … but I don't think I would have the career I had if I wasn't that type of person," the Quebec City native said in an NHL telephone conference call.

Responding to a question in French, he later added: "They say one game doesn't make a career. Well, I hope one game can't undo a career, either. … There were lots of great moments with the Canadiens, and since the [jersey retirement] announcement [on Sept. 11], more and more people have been talking to me about 1986, 1989, 1993."

In each of those seasons, Roy played in the Cup final with Montreal, winning twice.

Roy burst onto the scene as a skinny, callow rookie in the 1986 playoffs, leading the Canadiens to the Stanley Cup and claiming the Conn Smythe.

"A leader, a real competitor, you could tell from the first day," current Canadiens coach Guy Carbonneau, who drove to practice every day with Roy for nearly a decade, recently recalled.

That's praise that would please Roy, who said he wants to be remembered simply as a fierce competitor, not as a Québécois folk hero like Maurice Richard or Guy Lafleur.

It's revealing of Roy's standing among his former teammates that Stéphan Lebeau, a long-time friend and member of the 1993 Cup-winning team, to this day keeps a slip of paper in his wallet that features a Vince Lombardi-like inspirational verse the goalie distributed in the locker room that year.

"But if you're asking me what the line was, I couldn't tell you," Roy said with a laugh. He will be joined by most of the 1993 team at Saturday's ceremony, the first jersey retirement of the Canadiens' centennial season.

Though Roy is generally revered in Habs nation, some fans and commentators feel the honour should not be bestowed on a man who presided over an ugly brawl — in which his goaltender son beat up an unwilling opponent last year — in his capacity as the head coach of the Quebec Remparts junior team.

Roy is a complicated public figure, by turns irascible and charming — a supremely confident player with a legendary temper.

And in a town where the Canadiens jersey means more to fans than all but a handful of the men who have worn it, Roy delivered the ultimate affront on Dec. 2, 1995, when he effectively quit the team.

Former Habs coach Mario Tremblay, a former Roy teammate who also shares a birthday, left his star netminder in for nearly two periods against the Red Wings during a merciless 9-1 shelling — Detroit would win 11-1, the worst home defeat in Montreal Canadiens history.

When the incandescent Roy finally left the game, he walked past Tremblay to club president Ronald Corey's rinkside seat and angrily shouted he was done as a Hab.

Four days later, he was traded to the Avalanche, who began life as the beloved Quebec Nordiques of Roy's youth (Roy said his role models were former Los Angeles Kings goalie Rogatien Vachon and the Nords' Dan Bouchard).

It was, of course, inevitable that Roy's combative and inspired play would help lead the Avalanche to the Cup that season.

He won it again five seasons later and retired in May of 2003 after an overtime playoff loss to Minnesota. His 33 also hangs in the rafters of the Avalanche's Pepsi Center.