TORONTO -- It had been a rather business-like interview as we sat on a couch somewhere in the maze that is the Toronto Maple Leafs dressing room area up until the very end.
The guard comes down and the kid in Brendan Shanahan, who grew up in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke (neighborhood of Mimico), emerges when he is asked about the times in the mid-'80s when his mother would call a local sports show to talk about her son.
"It was local cable TV, Gino Reda hosting," Shanahan says and begins to laugh. "She's got a real thick Irish accent. The first couple of times she said who she was, that she was my mother. It got back to me, and I said to her, 'I forbid you to ever call the Etobicoke cable TV sports show ever again.'" Shanahan slaps his knee as he chuckles, the memory clearly an indelible one.
"So she said OK, but then they started to get these mysterious calls from a woman with an Irish accent that would give different names but her comments were always centered around me. I called her on that as well as she denied it before finally admitting it was her."
Reda, a longtime hockey host and broadcaster at TSN, also chuckles at the memory.
"It was a live Friday night show," he said. "She would call in and not just talk about Brendan but also his brothers because they were lacrosse players. Brendan would stop me at the rink and say, 'Stop letting my mom on the show. It's embarrassing.' The thing is, she really knew sports, she was awesome."
No doubt Mom will be offering her son opinions on the remake of the Maple Leafs too.
Shanahan will need that sense of humor that he's always had, for there will be some tough days ahead as president of the fabled Original Six club.
His biggest challenge of all will be avoiding the trappings that have tripped up the men who ran this club for the past 40-odd years. He needs to resist the intoxicating allure of ending the NHL's longest Stanley Cup drought by taking shortcuts to try to get there overnight.
It takes patience and sticking to the long-term plan.
As many hockey men have said before, to be the architect of a Leafs team that wins its first Cup since 1967 is to be immortalized in this city forever.
It would be akin to the Cubs finally winning again in Chicago. The party was big in Boston for the Red Sox in 2004; imagine what it would be like on Yonge Street in Canada's largest city where only one sport matters.
Shanahan knows all this. He was in the cheap seats at Maple Leaf Gardens as a young fan in the late 1970s and early '80s.
And he also knows what it's like to be faced with historical baggage.
"I was in Detroit when we were the longest-running team without a Stanley Cup," said Shanahan, whose 1996-97 Red Wings ended a 42-year Cup drought. "I was also part of the 1994 world championship team [Canada won gold], and we had a 30-something-year drought [33 years]. And then I was in Salt Lake City [where Canada ended a 50-year Olympic gold-medal drought].
"So I've been faced with teams that have had to conquer the drought. And you hear about it, you definitely hear about it. That's why you have to not focus on anything except the process."
Well, it's one thing to be playing on a team facing a drought like that. It's another to be the man charged with finding the answers to end it.
Here's the thing about Shanahan, though: He doesn't come across as a guy who pretends to have all the answers. He hasn't made any bold playoff predictions since taking over as Leafs president in April. In fact, he's stayed very much out of the media spotlight since he's been introduced.
"I didn't come here to be a media personality," said Shanahan, fulfilling the obligatory media requests this week because the season was opening up. "I understand the responsibility, and I have a lot of respect for the people who do that [media] work here. And I certainly think that there's a time and a place for someone in my role to speak to them. It's probably not every day and not every week. I think it's really about the players, the coaches, [GM] Dave Nonis and his staff."
Shanahan so far has let his actions speak for him. It was a busy summer with front-office people and coaches let go and replaced.
Left standing were Nonis and coach Randy Carlyle, the main holdovers from the pre-Shanahan Leafs.
From the outside looking in, it appears as though Shanahan and Nonis have a good thing going so far.
"Dave's been very open," Shanahan said. "I had a good relationship with him before I came here. There are some things that, whether I got hired or not, Dave was going to do. Now with me being hired, with every change people are going to assume it's me. Dave recognized and knew there are things that he needed to do and changes that he needed to make.
"But yeah, I like the way that they all work together, Dave, Brandon [Pridham] and Kyle [Dubas]. Just like our coaching staff and players, we're not done. We have a lot of work to do, but you just want to give people the best opportunity to have success."
The Dubas hiring got lots of attention over the summer, the Leafs plucking a 28-year-old out of junior hockey where he was running the OHL's Soo Greyhounds and making him the assistant GM in Toronto.
The hook was that he was an analytics disciple, a growing field in hockey that had largely been ignored by the pre-Shanahan Leafs.
The hiring made a splash. It was hailed by many who believe in the impact of analytics. It was also mocked by some in the hockey community just from the aspect of the attention it got.
"Did they really have to hold a news conference to announce an assistant GM?" wondered one rival NHL team executive.
To be fair, it was more of a media availability in the Leafs dressing room with Dubas, not a formal, glitzy podium affair. But still, it certainly got attention because of the analytics angle.
"It gets more focus here in Toronto because it's Toronto," Shanahan said. "But you know, we're not the first team to do this. We're not even the second or third. I'm not as concerned with what they call it. I just see it as information. I don't know of too many successful organizations, not only in sport but in the world, that don't want more information. The key is to have the type of personnel that can distinguish what is good information and what is bad information.
"One of the reasons that Dave and I were attracted to meeting with Kyle, and interviewing Kyle and ultimately hiring Kyle, was because he was a fluent hockey person that was also fluent in this information, and in some ways we knew that we were not going to be as behind as we currently were having a guy that knew the dead ends, knew the difference between good noise and bad noise. And so he's been very helpful in that regard. But ultimately, Dave and I both thought that Kyle was a very qualified hockey person even without the analytic background. He was just somebody that worked hard, liked to go to games, likes hockey, likes being in arenas but is also open-minded and thinks differently. I think that's what we wanted within our management group was a more diverse group of people."
It's not Shanahan's first time assembling people around him. He did it at the NHL offices, where he helped establish the New York-based Player Safety Department as chief disciplinarian.
What will be intriguing to see is how Shanahan reacts now that the shoe is on the other foot and he has a Leafs player called on the red carpet by his replacement and pal Stephane Quintal.
"I can either have some fun and call them up and go crazy, but since the 48-hour rule came in, I can't do that either," he said with a chuckle, because he was the author of the rule that forbids teams from reaching out to Player Safety immediately after a decision.
"Maybe 48 hours and one minute later I'll send them a bouquet of flowers depending on the result," added Shanahan with a laugh.
"But no, when things like this happen, I certainly will be heavily interested in the outcome," he says in a serious tone now. "Because I know the way the department is built. They're transparent. Anybody that wants to pay attention and look at the standard videos can generally dictate what is and isn't a suspension, 90 percent of them. There's always that 10 percent that are gray for us and gray for them. But I know the rules and I'd like to think that there always remains a good understanding."
That job in New York, just like this one in Toronto, comes with a heavy dose of scrutiny.
It's why Mom had to be warned again.
"She got the speech again when I started doing [NHL] discipline," said a chuckling Shanahan. "I said, 'You should probably stop listening to the radio if you don't want to have a lot of bad days.' But I think she learned when I took on that role, which maybe is the other most controversial role [other than running the Leafs], she got a quick education on that.
"And you know, it was a good education for me. It was good job training for this."