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We aren’t very far removed from the retirement of Trevor Linden, and even closer still to the retirement of his iconic #16 jersey. And as his career has been characterized by many traits, so too has it been punctuated by occasional questions from the media asking…

Why does Vancouver have a terminal man-crush on Trevor Linden? What is it about this guy? Why does the city want to claw through the plexi-glass and mob any opposing player who lays him out with a bodycheck? Why are the perpetual Vancouver rainclouds twice as dark if Linden is a healthy scratch on game day?

The answer can be found in two words… Rocky Balboa.

Put simply, Trevor Linden is the closest thing the NHL has ever seen to the fictional prize fighter. In 1976, moviegoers flocked to theatres and cheered, hoped and cried as they watched a humble, lovable underdog take on the most imposing, indestructable, undefeatable of foes…and he almost won. What made Rocky great, what made him a fan favorite, what made the world identify with him like few characters in movie history, was that he didn’t win.

He didn’t win…but he didn’t fail. In struggling against all odds to merely go the distance with world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, to make it to the end of the 15th round and still be standing, he personified the concept of victory in defeat. So, too, did Trevor Linden. And that is why a forward with less than 1,000 points has his name mentioned around town in the same sentence as “Hall of Fame.” That is why an oversized #16 banner was probably sitting in a vault for years, just waiting for Linden’s official retirement so it could take its rightful place in the rafters at GM Place.

For 20 years in the NHL, in innumerable ways, Trevor Linden always faced impossible odds. And he always lost. But he always made a fight out of it. And that’s what heroes do.

At the end of his rookie year, which began immediately after being drafted out of junior (something rarely seen these days), Linden found himself one of the three finalists for the Calder Trophy (NHL Rookie of the Year). The player from a small-market underexposed team was up against not one but two New York Rangers: Tony Granato and Brian Leetch. Everyone from your dog to Don Cherry was wearing a “Vote for Linden” button in hopes of swaying the powers that be. The award went to the phenomenally talented Leetch. The hearts of the lunchbucket everyman and hockey mom went to the hard-working Linden.

And so began a career of blood, sweat, tears and heartbreaking near-misses. Linden led the team to its first two divisional championships since forever in 1992 and 1993, followed by second round playoff exits. In 1994, after an extremely ordinary regular season for the Canucks, they began a Cinderella run to the Stanley Cup finals that began with a rare comeback in the first round from a 3-1 series deficit to the Calgary Flames.

If Brian Leetch had been Linden’s Apollo Creed early in his career, then Mark Messier and the 1994 New York Rangers were his Ivan Drago. Like the small Italian to the towering Russian in Rocky IV, Trevor Linden and his unlikely hero Canucks were tragically overmatched. The New York Rangers had won the President’s trophy as the league’s top team in the regular season, and had been proclaimed not only the league’s best but a team of destiny when Messier had called his shot before leading the Rangers through the New Jersey Devils on the path to their meeting with the Canucks.

Linden’s best season had been 80 points. Messier was coming off of two recent league MVP awards and was not far removed from a 129-point season. His supporting crew included a who’s who of Stanley Cup winners, from Kevin Lowe to Glenn Anderson to Esa Tikkanen to Craig MacTavish. There was the league’s 884-game ironman Steve Larmer. There was Linden’s old mentor Doug Lidster.

The Vancouver Canucks had been to the Stanley Cup finals once before, in 1982, and despite a valiant battle, they had been knocked out viciously by the New York Islanders in the midst of their dynasty. Well, Rocky Balboa was in the ring this time…and in true Trevor Linden fashion, he didn’t win. But he took it to the end of the fifteenth round and he was still standing. And largely on his strength, so were all of the Canucks.

Messier played the role of Ivan Drago to perfection. He was a first rate A-hole. With Trevor Linden injured on the ice late in Game 6, Messier skated by and hit Linden again, leaving him crawling to the bench in desperation. Jim Robson was to Linden as Stu Nahan was to Rocky Balboa, and this moment gave both the player and the broadcaster their most memorable audio clip.

The Canucks came back from another 3-1 deficit to force a seventh game, which they lost by one goal. In the 3-2 defeat, Linden potted both goals for Vancouver, playing with a broken nose and torn rib cartilage. As Adrian was to Rocky, the entire city of Vancouver was to Linden, and as he and the team arrived in the city, bruised and swollen, the Vancouver faithful were there to meet them. Fourteen years later, he would be the last of these men wearing Canuck colors, but the city and the man had a bond forged by fire.

A couple years later, he was driven out of town in favor of Mark Messier as a high-priced free agent. He was the hero Vancouver deserved, but not the one it needed at the time. When the organization was ready to return to Canucks hockey, the hero we deserved returned, casting away the #32 he had worn in other cities and pulling over his pads the only number that looked right under the name Linden.

There were the 1998 Olympics, where in the elimination game, he scored Canada’s only goal to get them into overtime against the Czech Republic. On the strength of his goal, he sat on the bench and watched, as did all of Canada, while the team lost in a shootout and went home without the gold medal they had come for.

And like Rocky, there was always a sequel. Always another heartwrenching near-success to pull the fans to the edge of their seats. As the president of the NHLPA in the 2004-05 lockout, Linden was the face of the players and the human shield behind which they launched their steadfast refusal to accept a salary cap. And had any other man been sitting in Linden’s seat, it might have been impossible to stomach millionaire hockey players claiming that no one of them should have to settle for less than $15 million a season. That a hard cap of $50 million for a twenty-something man roster was a travesty against their rights.

But the man gave a human face to a group that could have been dismissed as elitists. This was the kid who had cancelled his first meeting with the Canucks management because his uncle needed him to help birth the calves on his farm. And on the eve of the cancellation of the 2004-05 season, it was Linden that brought in the two saviors who, if he couldn’t, might be able to save hockey for the year. And so it was that Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux were summoned to make the peace. No stone had been left unturned. A gaunt, weary and drawn Linden had spread himself to transparency in the name of saving hockey and even when all appeared lost, was tossing a Hail Mary into the end zone.

Did it work? Of course not. The season was cancelled. But he had made it to the end of the fifteenth round and he was still standing.

Indeed, so it was that Linden ended up as friend and teammate to, and forever associated with, a crew of unlikely heroes. Stan Smyl, his first mentor, from whom he received the torch of the Canucks captaincy, himself an undersized and grizzled veteran whose self-sacrificial style of play caused his body to wear out before he reached 900 games. Kirk McLean, the NHL’s last great stand-up goaltender, clinging to a dying style of puckstopping and making it work when it would have been obsolete in anyone else’s hands. Cliff Ronning, who at 5′7″ had no business contemplating a career in any sport other than equestrian, yet finished in the top 100 in NHL career scoring partly by stickhandling his way through the dead puck era.

And when it was all said and done, there were no Stanley Cups, no Hart Trophies, no 100-point seasons. In his final game he was absent from the scoring summary as the Canucks fell 7-1 to the Calgary Flames after missing the playoffs. Fittingly, he finished his NHL career with 99 playoff points, one shy of the Hall-of-Fame-ish milestone of 100.

Why did an entire city fall forever in love with one man? Why did this man who never won a major award, who never led the team to the Stanley Cup, become an unimpeachable hero for multiple generations? Because he always lost without failing. Because he proved to an entire city that you didn’t have to win to be a winner.