So long, Great prince

Everybody said goodbye to Wayne Gretzky in their own way yesterday, none more gracefully than the game with a tough reputation and the town with an even tougher one.

National Hockey League commissioner Gary Bettman did so by retiring his number. Teammates gave him a large-screen TV. The Rangers gave him a Mercedes-Benz. The crowd of 18,200 stood as one nearly every time the puck turned up on his stick.

AP PHOTO Wayne Gretzky may be the best hockey player ever to grace the ice, but in Canada he's a little more than that. The now-retired icer was thought of by Canadians as one of the country's greatest heroes.

Everybody came bearing gifts for The Great One it seemed, except the Pittsburgh Penguins. And even the villains in the 1,487th and final game of Gretzky's career were helpless to stop him from picking up assist No. 1,963 on a nifty forehand pass that led to the Rangers' only goal.

The Penguins did win a measure of revenge with a 2-1 victory on a goal by Jaromir Jagr in overtime. "Jagr said to me he didn't mean do it," Gretzky said afterward. "That's what I used to say."

But even that couldn't take the luster off his day.

The puck had barely rippled the Rangers' net when Jagr led his teammates in forming a receiving line to shake The Great One's hand. Countless hugs, three curtain calls and several tearful laps of the arena later, Gretzky left hockey the way he came in - with his head held high and the right side of his jersey still tucked into the corner of his pants.

Before the game the Rangers painted "99" on the ice between the nets and the backboards on both ends in recognition of the space Gretzky called his "office" - where he dished out literally hundreds of assists. On his third shift of the opening period, he set up shop there and two Penguins materialized on either side of the net, hoping to hem Gretzky in.

He began dribbling the puck, backhand then forehand, keeping it tantalizingly out of the reach of both players. Neither dared lunge at him, maybe because they had seen the same replays the rest of us had hundreds of times: Gretzky threading a lethal pass through the narrowest of openings; Gretzky delicately flipping the puck over the net, off the back of the goalkeeper, and into the net; Gretzky spotting an onrushing teammate and caroming the puck off the corner boards, the way a pool hustler might.

The Penguins, as it turned out, dodged the bullet that time and on another dozen opportunities like it. Gretzky kept setting up teammates; they kept failing to finish. But every time he did so was one more bit of proof that the game really does slow down for the great ones, that they know not just where everything would happen, but where it would happen next.

In the days before he announced his retirement, Gretzky asked Trevor whether he planned to be on hand for yesterday's game. The 6-year-old said, no, he had a Little League game scheduled and he wanted to be there instead.

And so just this once, Trevor's old man did something he never did. He asked for special treatment.

"They had a practice yesterday and we talked to the team, changed things around a little bit. I guess," Wayne Gretzky said, "I had that much pull."

04-19-99