For as much as things change, they stay the same. Laperriere, the Flyers' 35-year-old forward, still loves to play. After taking a puck to the face in the first period on Black Friday, which knocked out seven teeth and required more than 75 stitches to close the wound to his face, Laperriere was back on the ice in the third period.
We know he's still fearless. He was angry it took the doctors so long to stitch him up.
Tomorrow, Laperriere will return to his roots - where most hockey players learned to love the game - when the Flyers take on the Bruins outside in the 2010 Winter Classic at Fenway Park.
"I remember coming home from school and the first thing I'd do would be my homework," Laperriere said with a wink. "I'd pick up my skates and my helmet and my older cousins would pick me up and take me to the outdoor rink.
"In the winter, we'd put a sheet of ice with boards in the baseball park. If it was snowing, we'd get there and shovel and get the ice ready. Then we'd put our sticks in the middle of the ice, pick teams and go."
If it wasn't for Laperriere's cousins, Eric and Stephane Kingsley, he would have been stuck at home and left with his youth team's boring practices. He started playing for his town's youth team by age 6.
He knew, though, that the real fun was in the outdoor pickup games.
"When I played outside, the game didn't mean anything," Laperriere said. "We'd say at school to meet at the park after school, if we didn't have practice. Nobody wanted to get hurt. It was like passing the puck and scoring goals. That's the way it was then. It wasn't physical at all."
Luckily for Laperriere, the Kingsleys lived just one block away. It took the boys 5 minutes on foot to get to the park.
"He bugged us all the time to play with us," Eric Kingsley recalled. "He wanted to learn everything so soon. He couldn't learn everything fast enough. He always wanted to try to be better."
