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A career that culminated with his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame began, you might say, some 20 blocks and 56 years from where Al Shaver celebrated on Tuesday night.
The year was 1937. Walter Shaver - an auto dealer, later a farm-implement dealer - brought his 9-year-old son 125 miles from Tillsonburg, Ontario, on a spring night for a Maple Leafs playoff game against the Boston Bruins and bought him a $2.50 ticket in the arena's preferred blue section. Until then, the boy's only images of Maple Leaf Gardens, at the corner of Church and Carlton streets in downtown Toronto, came from a voice on the radio and from within his own mind.
"We came into the Gardens and my dad showed me all the great Maple Leaf players, `There's Turk Broda, there's Syl Apps, there's Red Horner,' " Al Shaver said. "I think the first thing I asked him was, `Where does Foster Hewitt sit?' "
Hewitt was hockey's pioneering voice on that modern invention called radio, and he sat in a gondola suspended 50 feet above the Gardens ice.
Al Shaver had fallen asleep next to his father by the time George Parsons scored the game's only goal in overtime for Toronto that night, but he came away thinking one thing. "I saw where...