What immortalized him, though, is what fans still call "The Shift" - Lucic's early demo-derby number on four rivals that set the tone for that championship afternoon.
"He just demolished three players, won a fight, and that was it," remembers Rod Tanabe, a counselor at Killarney Secondary, Lucic's high school. "The game was over."
The Shift, which every kid in town has viewed a dozen times on YouTube, is the essence of the pugnacious and practical philosophy that propelled the 20-year-old Lucic from Junior B to the Bruins in just three years: Get on the scoresheet somehow.
That's what Dan Kesa, who played four seasons in the NHL during the 1990s, told his nephew back when he was struggling to make junior teams.
"He always said, 'No matter what it is, you've got to do something to get noticed,' " Lucic says. "Whether it's just going out there and making big hits and getting in everyone's faces and fighting or scoring. When you're going into a tryout, you want the general manager and the people picking the team to walk away and say, 'Did you see that Lucic kid?' "
To understand the roots of Looch, you have to know something about East Vancouver, the sprawling melting-pot neighborhood that historically has been the first stop for the city's immigrants - the English and Welsh, the Scots and Irish, the Italians and Germans, the Greeks and Serbs, the Chinese and Indians.
"Usually, the East Van kids had hard-working parents with not much money trying to build their lives up," says Kesa, who grew up in the Serbian community there.
Lucic's mother, Snezana, arrived in East Vancouver when she was 2. His father, Dobro, grew up in Sarajevo, where World War I was kindled, and emigrated at 29, becoming a longshoreman because there was no market for his background in Yugoslav law. Three sons arrived within four years - Jovanin 1987, Milan in 1988, and Nikolain 1990.
