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I wanted to be the captain. I’d been captain of many teams since the age of 10. Even as a professional player, I still believed that my performance improved when the coaches looked at me to be a leader. I was aware of the pressures and expectations, and felt ready to handle them. Yet something was holding me back. In the room, I wasn’t a really vocal guy. Joe Sakic had been a quieter captain in my years with the Nordiques and had gone on to lead his team to a Cup win. There was one obvious person to seek out for a chat: Börje Salming.

Though he didn’t talk about it much, Börje had twice been offered the captaincy in pc28����a decade earlier, and he’d turned it down both times. When I called to tell him they’d offered it to me, he was insistent.

“Mats,” he said in his familiar raspy voice, “you have to say yes.”

Börje told me that saying no to the Maple Leafs captaincy was the biggest regret of his career. As a guy from northern Sweden with a thick accent, he was worried people wouldn’t accept him in the role. He’d heard it said that C stood not only for captain, but, symbolically, for Canadian. Every captain in the history of the pc28����Maple Leafs had hailed from Canada. Börje could have changed that, and regretted that he didn’t. Now, it was up to me. I knew all of this. And I did feel like a leader in the room and on the ice. When Doug (Gilmour) was traded away, the role seemed to sway naturally in my direction.

“It’s a huge honour,” Börje said. “The biggest honour. You must do it.”

Börje was adamant. If the role was being offered, it meant the team and management felt I was ready. He was right. I called Ken Dryden to accept. At the end of September 1997, Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment held a dinner where former captain Darryl Sittler presented me with a jersey with the C sewn above the heart. It felt surreal to pull it over my head. After the dinner, I went home and called my family. It was 6 a.m. in Stockholm, but I couldn’t wait to share the news. My parents were thrilled. They’d visited me in pc28����enough to understand the significance of my new role. It was big news here, but it would be big news back in Sweden, too.

I’d only been on the team for three years, but with so many changes, I was already one of the longest-tenured Leafs. The media asked me a lot of questions about the pressures of the role. I cracked jokes to deflect, but the truth was, the pressure didn’t bother me. Eleven years earlier, as a 15-year-old standing under the camera’s glare at the TV-pucken tournament, I’d learned that I played better on a bigger stage. That turned out to be a good thing, because right off the bat, the pressures of the 1997-98 season were intense. In the first three weeks, we managed only two wins in nine games. The management were treating it as a rebuilding year, but that didn’t make losing any easier. As captain, I had to answer for our failure to win. More than anything, I felt responsible to the younger guys navigating the pressures of pc28����for the first time. In a city that takes losing as personally as pc28����does, it’s easy to fall into a trap of blaming yourself and letting your confidence spiral. It happened to all of us. At team meetings, I’d remind them to keep their focus where it belonged — on their game.

A bright spot that season was the agreement between the NHL and the International Olympic Committee that would allow professional ice hockey players to compete in the Winter Olympics for the first time. In 1988, I’d been too young to compete for Sweden at the Calgary Olympics. By 1992, I was playing in the NHL. I’d figured that by turning pro, I’d traded away any chance to play for Sweden in the Olympic Games. Heading to Nagano, Japan, for the 1998 tournament was a dream come true. As soon as the deal was announced, my family made plans to travel from Sweden to Nagano, by far the farthest from home any of the Sundins had ever been.

The league organized milk-run flights to Japan. Our flight from pc28����stopped in Vancouver to pick up more players before crossing the Pacific Ocean. At the Tokyo airport, we boarded buses for the three-and-a-half-hour drive west, inland to Nagano. I was jet-lagged and grateful for the chance to nap. With the cityscape rolling by, I fell into a deep sleep. When I woke up what felt like hours later, I was surprised to still see tall buildings out the bus window. On a map, the land between Tokyo and Nagano was green and rural. Had I slept the whole drive? No. We were only just reaching the edges of Tokyo. By then, I’d visited many cities that dwarfed Stockholm — New York, Los Angeles. Even pc28����could feel like it stretched on forever. But Tokyo was beyond my scope, a city with more people in it than all of Canada.

One of the best things about the Games was that the NHL players got to stay in the Olympic Village with the rest of the athletes. The Swedish team’s apartments were clustered together. Some of the people I trained with in the summers in Bosön were there, including downhill skier Pernilla Wiberg. The tournament was tightly scheduled, so my family had to keep themselves busy while I attended practices and meals with the team. I was thrilled to be playing with legends like Ulf Samuelsson, but also newer guys like Daniel Alfredsson and Peter Forsberg.

With professionals in the mix, this was truly the best hockey in the world. In the round robin, we beat the USA but lost a close game to the powerhouse Canadian team, which included Wayne Gretzky and Joe Sakic. With a win against Belarus, we secured a quarterfinal matchup against our biggest rivals in sport, Finland. A tight 2-1 loss to the Finns bounced us from the tournament. I got a day or two to spend with my parents before we all returned to our respective homes. Per and Patrick were gracious. They’d had fun, even if we’d failed to advance to the medal round. Had my dad enjoyed himself?

“I hope I didn’t bring you bad luck,” he said.

In the end, a Czech goalie named Dominik Hašek stymied even the top scorers in the world, game after game. He led his team to an upset victory over Canada in the semifinals by stoning them in a shootout. Two days later, he shut out Russia to win gold. It was an admirable performance. I didn’t know it then, but a year later, I’d come up against Hašek myself, deep in the Stanley Cup playoffs. I got back to Canada in time to play out the final 20 games of the season. While Nagano was a disappointing result, it did teach me just how hard it is to win when the very best are playing the very best. Despite a final push in April, the Leafs failed to make the playoffs for the second year in a row. For four years, I’d led the team in goals and assists, sometimes by a margin of more than 30 points. At 27, I felt in peak form. But hockey is a team sport. Just as I’d been years earlier in Quebec, I was hopeful that the addition of a few missing pieces could tip us over the edge and back into contention.

As we were packing our bags in April for the second year in a row, coach Mike Murphy was taking the fall for our failure to make the playoffs. The disappointment was tempered by my chance to go to Switzerland in May and play in the world championship. Sweden went undefeated and won gold with a narrow 1-0 win over our rival Finland, an act of revenge for their ousting us in Nagano. I tied for the tournament’s scoring with my teammate Peter Forsberg and Finland’s Raimo Helminen. I loved winning at the international level, but seven years into my NHL career, my focus had shifted to the Stanley Cup.

At the end of June, pc28����reporters had no trouble tracking me down in Stockholm to tell me that the Leafs had hired Pat Quinn as the new head coach. They read back what he’d said to them in his first interviews after accepting the job.

“I will look at what we have,” Quinn said, “and see how we can support Mats Sundin.”

The reporters asked for my thoughts. I told them that Quinn’s words made me hopeful. There was no doubt that we needed more depth. When the reporters asked me about Quinn, it was easy to be diplomatic: I was excited to work with him. The management team continued their work building our depth, securing winger Steve Thomas and goalie Curtis Joseph.

The earliest photo in the paper was of Quinn and Ken Dryden holding up a Leafs jersey. In his other hand, Quinn held a cigar. This was the man who’d approached me over 10 years earlier at a Four Nations tournament to give me that Vancouver Canucks pin and assure me that I had a future in professional hockey. The man who’d stirred things up at the 1989 draft by selecting Pavel Bure when other teams were convinced he wasn’t yet eligible. The man who’d sought me out to shake my hand when I was drafted first overall. By the time the Leafs hired him, Pat Quinn had already made a few brief appearances in my life. He was about to become a main character.