Peabody at Michigan Against the World wrote a lengthy tribute to the Captain in honor of his retirement. Below is a brief excerpt, but you can visit his blog to read the rest of the post.

We can sense it in the air. The end of an era is about to occur here in Hockeytown. While he hasn’t come out and said it, everything in Steve Yzerman’s actions (from his humble, non-commital interviews on Jim Rome, to discussing the transition into the front office with Joe D) suggests that The Captain is playing his final spring in the winged wheel. In all likelihood, we are a week away from his final regular season game at The Joe (April 17). This is a moment I’ve been dreading literally my entire life. There is no way anything I write can do Yzerman’s career justice, so I will instead talk about what Stevie Y has meant to me, and in turn, probably every other hockey fan of my age in vicinity of Detroit. This will be poorly-written, I’m sure, because this is one subject I could go on for hours writing about.

I grew up a hockey fan first. I knew hockey before I grew to love football, basketball, and to an extent, baseball. I was one of the few kids in my school to actually play hockey, and by third grade, it was my entire life. Luckily, there were a few of us, a die-hard core of kids, that lived and breathed hockey. As a third-grader, there was absolutely no one cooler than Steve Yzerman. My first memory of Yzerman was watching the Red Wings with my father. Yzerman was a 22 year old player establishing himself as a star in the league. I remember Yzerman breaking the 50 goal barrier in 1988, only to crash into the goalpost the same period, tearing his ACL in what was thought (at the time) to be a career-threatening injury. Yzerman elevated from “favorite player” to Superhero when he managed to make it back by the third game of the Campbell Conference Finals the same season. The Red Wings lost, but as a 7 year old, well, I was hooked.