Aging & Wisdom Quote by Mario Lemieux

There is something almost disarming about how Lemieux frames reverence as an awkward, everyday inconvenience: “the young guys” wanting a stick or photo. He’s not delivering a victory speech; he’s narrating a hallway moment. That’s the point. In a league obsessed with the next phenom, he’s describing respect as a social ritual that still interrupts the routine, proof that legacy is real because it shows up unannounced, in requests you can’t quite refuse.

The phrasing does quiet work. “I think that they respect…” lands like a soft hedge, the kind athletes use to avoid sounding self-mythologizing. Yet he immediately supplies the résumé anyway: “what I have achieved throughout my career.” It’s modesty with receipts. Lemieux is acknowledging the pecking order without saying “I’m a legend,” because in hockey culture, overt self-celebration reads as gauche. Let others do the lionizing; he’ll simply observe it.

Context matters: Lemieux is a figure whose dominance is inseparable from interruption - cancer, injury, retirements, comebacks, then the rare player-owner status that made him both myth and institution. When he talks about “the first few games,” he’s also talking about first contact between eras. The subtext isn’t nostalgia; it’s succession. The kids are asking for artifacts, and he’s clocking what that means: they know who built the stage they’re sprinting across, and for a moment the future pauses to get an autograph from the past.