He says he had no idea.
Sidney Crosby is in the same seat he always takes in the visitors' room at Canadian Tire Centre when his Pittsburgh Penguins meet the Ottawa Senators.
Last seat, first row, closest to the door leading out to the ice.
The same stall, incidentally, where Wayne Gretzky dressed and undressed on April 15, 1999, the day he played his final NHL game in Canada.
The Great One was the last Canadian hockey god before The Next One came along in 2005. Both have now raised the Stanley Cup, both have won scoring championships, both have scored or set up iconic goals in international play, both have long reigned as the best player in the game that Canada gave the world.
And both have been counted out before their time.
Crosby arrived in Ottawa for Tuesday's game against the Senators in third place in league scoring, with 33 goals and 82 points and four games left to play. He cannot win the scoring championship – Patrick Kane of the Chicago Blackhawks has 100 points – yet Crosby's climb is nothing short of astonishing, given that he didn't score his first point until the sixth game of the season and had but two goals through the first 18 matches.
"What is wrong with Crosby?" they asked. Has he, at 28, entered the long downward slide of a brilliant career?
With Gretzky, the doubting came a bit later in his career. He was 32 in the spring of 1993 when one L.A. newspaper kissed him off as "The Good One." The year had been miserable, complicated by a herniated disk. He fell down at the all-star game and looked beaten. When his Kings met the Toronto Maple Leafs in the playoffs, then-Toronto Star columnist Bob McKenzie wrote, rather accurately, that he seemed to be "skating like a man with a piano on his back."
He would prove them all wrong. His back better, he scored 130 points the next season, and played six more before retiring on his own terms.
Another legend, Jean Béliveau, was written off during the 1962-63 season when Montreal media were regularly airing the "Will he retire?" stories.
"I was continually being analyzed by pundits who didn't like what they saw or who made up what they wanted to," Béliveau wrote in his autobiography. "My mental stability was called into question: Was I strong enough to handle all this adversity?"
He listed headlines from the day: "Even during practice, Béliveau is hitting the posts." "A hot rumour circulating that Béliveau is suffering from a serious illness." "Jean Béliveau: the best was never enough …"
"I could go on," he wrote, "but these paint the picture – a miserable slump that never seemed to end."
But, of course, it did end. Béliveau won the Hart Trophy the next season, and the Conn Smythe Trophy the year after that as he proved the best player in the playoffs while leading his Canadiens to yet another Stanley Cup, one of five he would raise following his "miserable slump."
On Tuesday morning, sitting in the Gretzky stall, Crosby considered his own miserable autumn of 2015 and how, somehow, he has become the top scoring threat of 2016.
"Slump," he repeats. "That's not a word I like to use a lot."
He did not use the word again, but all the same talked at length about it.
"I think that it's definitely a confidence thing," he says. "Your confidence isn't there sometimes, and it can be for a lot of different reasons. If I'm to speak on my own behalf, I feel like when chances are there you still have that confidence. You're getting chances and, regardless of them going in or not, you feel that eventually they will if you're getting them in bunches. For me, that's always a big thing."
But what of the flip side of that word – the hot streak that he's been on of late as his Penguins were winning six straight heading into the match with the Senators, and were 9-1-0 over the past 10 games, suddenly vaulting them into favoured status for the upcoming playoffs?
"Obviously, when they're going in, you're definitely aware of it, and you're probably shooting more," he says. "It feels that, with your shots on or anything around the net, you seem to have just a little more time.
"But I think that's just a confidence thing. How you get to that point is a little bit different for everybody, but I think getting chances is a big part of that."
He feels he tried to do too much to pull himself out of the spin and simply complicated matters all the more. The Penguins had a new coach in Mike Sullivan, who replaced Mike Johnston in early December, and Sullivan was stressing skilled, puck-possession hockey, which plays to Crosby's natural gifts. Crosby simplified his own game and began attacking more ferociously, driving to the net harder and counting on one of those chances breaking his season open – which is exactly what happened.
"There was no doubt I needed to be better than I was at the start of the season," he said. And he is.
As one Pittsburgh beat writer put it this week, "The Penguins matter again … Crosby is the best player in the world again …"
That might be a bit debatable. But there is no arguing that The Next One is sitting exactly where he should be.
Roy MacGregor