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At six-foot-four inches tall, Dryden was a literal giant on the ice, as well as a metaphorical one off it. He embodied bigness: in the number of things he did (and did well) and in the scope of his ideas, especially about Canada and its place in the world.

If millions of fans hadn’t personally witnessed it, Dryden’s hockey career would be thought of as literally incredible today. With the Montreal Canadiens, he was named most valuable player of the Stanley Cup playoffs even before he’d won NHL rookie of the year.

He won six championships in only eight professional seasons. He was in net when Team Canada made history against the Soviet Union in 1972. (He was also somehow ). He won three-quarters of the games he played. If there were a Hockey Hall of Even More Fame, Dryden would be a first-ballot inductee.

And he accomplished much of that while attending law school. In fact, he took a year off in the middle of his short NHL career to article at a firm in ɫɫ��. After retiring from hockey, Dryden practised and taught law, then became a writer — not just of books about hockey (although he did ���������Ǵ���) but also a novel about , plus non-fiction works on  and .

He served as president of the ɫɫ�� Maple Leafs from 1997 to 2003, then ran for office and became an MP for York Centre, serving as a cabinet minister . In 2006, he ran for the Liberal leadership.

I was on the convention floor in Montreal when Dryden’s leadership bid went down in flames. He wasn’t a noted orator, but I remember his speech well — because it sounded as if he’d read it from one of his books or essays, his authorial style and big-picture philosophizing evident in every phrase.

He began by enumerating the many parts of Canada he’d visited during his campaign, noting the diversity you can find throughout this country, the multitudes we contain. “It’s the bigness of this place, not the distances,” he said. “Our spirit, what we’ve done. That’s us.” A rising conservative tide, he warned, stood against this: “Their understanding of Canada is so small, so pinched. Ungenerous. Divisive.”

We’re a big country, he said, one that can do big things and has done big things. “Whatever we’ve been,” he added, “we will be far more in the future.” In his 2010 book, Becoming Canada, Dryden returned to that theme, arguing that Canadians should understand their country as “something bigger” than what they’ve traditionally imagined.

Writing about the 4 Nations Face-Off earlier this year, when U.S. President Donald Trump was really leaning into his “51st state” talk, Dryden considered sports as national symbols we could learn from when faced with existential threats. “Everybody, every country, has something inside them that is fundamental. That matters so much that it’s not negotiable. That’s deeply, deeply personal,” he wrote. “Something that, if threatened, you’d do anything to protect.”

He concluded: “Canadians are defiantly not-American. They will need to be much more than that in the next four years. Canadians will need to be defiantly Canadian.”

His idea of what “defiantly Canadian” means reflected his approach to life: staying open to opportunities and ready to try different things, looking not only at the job in front of him but also at the bigger picture and the potential it represents.

Born in Hamilton, Dryden was a definitively ɫɫ�� boy who became a legend in Montreal. He was also a great Canadian, a big man who lived a big life thinking big thoughts about his big country. And we’ve lost him at a time when Canada could use much more of that.