Shaun Assael's feature on Dallas goalie Ed Belfour appears in the April 2 edition of ESPN The Magazine. We asked Shaun to reflect on the Belfour he met and the Belfour we perceive.

Before I'm ushered into the video room of the Dallas Stars practice facility to meet Ed Belfour, I'm warned that there are three things he isn't:

a) a morning person
b) happy talking about himself
c) as cantankerous as the press makes him out to be

The first is evident as soon as I walk in the room. He barely gets up. Just a half rise and a pre-caffeinated nod. Which brings us to (b), inasmuch as Belfour doesn't really want to talk. He wants to watch a tape of his play the night before. He does this after every game and it's a habit that everyone who's played under him -- from the Sabres' Dominik Hasek to the Wild's Manny Fernandez -- has picked up.

Belfour is a tidy goalie, but the clip he's watching shows him deflecting a puck back into a fast-moving play. "I shot it too far up the boards," he mutters. "I should have done a little reverse in the corner. There, it went by our winger." Suddenly he's spread out on the ice, muscles twitching. "I had to make one ... two ... three saves. I got lucky."

He's got an ice pack on his back, and every time he moves with it I think of the classic muscle cars he rebuilds in his garage in Michigan -- the kind you can hear grinding all the way down a gravel road. And so, as we start to chat ("How ya feelin', Ed? Ready for another long postseason haul?") I'm already drumming up car metaphors in my head. Stuff like, "He's 36 and is the engine that's driven the Stars down the long road of the playoffs for two straight years." Whatever. Package the guy as neatly as possible.

Which brings us to (c). For most of his career, Belfour hasn't lifted a finger to influence the way we think about him. Maybe it's the insecurity that comes from being a blue-collar kid living among more glamorous rivals. After all, he was a walk-on at University of North Dakota, where he won an NCAA title, and he had to get his first job with Chicago through free agency. You don't forget that, even after three trips to the finals and a Stanley Cup.

But he would do well to take a lesson from another surly star -- Albert Belle. How many people had nice things to say about him when he retired with an arthritic hip last month? Belfour has some of the same control-freak tendencies. It's one thing not to want to talk about what was apparently a bitter divorce. But when I wanted to print the size of one of his boats (48 feet), he told our research staff that I'd made a mistake -- that he didn't have a boat at all. Better to obfuscate, I suppose, than to reveal an interesting part of yourself.

And yet, a scheduled 20-minute interview stretched well past an hour when he started reminiscing about his youth in Canada, waiting for Sunday nights so he could drive to Winnipeg to drag race. His eyes lit up talking about the pro stock NHRA team he wants to start when he retires. As I wrote in The Magazine, Belfour wants to represent Canada in the Olympics, an honor that in 1998 went to Patrick Roy, Curtis Joseph and Martin Brodeur. There are signs -- my story, for example -- that Belfour understands that he needs to be more like those three, to open up a bit more about himself.

A man who takes as much fire as he does is entitled to disappear into his own private world. But it would be a shame if, after being so fearless in the crease, he ended up being afraid to let us get to know him while it can still do him some good.

Shaun Assael is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at shaun.assael@espnmag.com.