Forget love. French is the language of arrogance. Patrick Roy speaks it fluently. Sometimes without saying a word. Through 17 seasons, a league-record 484 victories and three Stanley Cups, nothing in hockey has been cooler than his blue eyes or more cocksure than his wink.

The guy has nerve. Unsatisfied with being simultaneously as graceful as a butterfly and as impenetrable as a missile silo, the Avalanche goalie regularly stamps his signature on spectacular saves by standing alone in the cheering arena, bobbing his head to the chants of his name. So domineering is Roy that upon stopping the puck in the heat of a big game, even his noggin struts. Has he no humility?

"Arrogant," Roy says. "It is the same word in French or English."

Every goalie needs a wicked dose of attitude to survive. Roy, however, has long displayed je ne sais quoi in Hall of Fame proportions, especially at crunch time. "You look at the sparks that come off those eyes when Patrick Roy's on his game, it's scary," Colorado coach Bob Hartley says. "When he's in that zone, you need a bullet to get the puck by him."

While lesser players nervously squeeze the stick in the playoffs, Roy contemptuously wears a devil's smile. "Even at this level, some guys have a special gift," says Avalanche defenseman Ray Bourque. "I don't know if it's cockiness. But it's an intense love of a challenge. And Patrick Roy has the gift. You can sense it."

Fearlessness, and the praise thereof, knows no boundaries. Which explains why original Roy devotees from Boulevard Rene Levesque in Montreal to fanatics on Denver's 16th Street Mall have loved his arrogance all these years. It doesn't matter whether your dollars are Canadian or American. In any currency, Roy is a money goalie. He carefully creates the image of a savior capable of answering the prayers of players caught in hockey's tightest vise: sudden-death overtime in the playoffs (he's 35-13 in playoff OT games). Worshipers call him St. Patrick.

But what happens when the goalie who has always worn that arrogance like a cape removes his mask and discovers the panic of self-doubt? At age 35, Roy has for the first time been forced to address a most unnerving feeling. Roy's worth has long been as tangible as all those Conn Smythe and Vezina trophies engraved with his name. Pretty hardware, however, couldn't protect him from a midlife crisis that has a nasty habit of sneaking up swiftly on a goalie. Too often, the keeper is the last to know. But there comes a day in every goalie's career when each tough shot seems to be a cruel slap to his ego, and absolutely nothing can save him from embarrassment.

Let Grant Fuhr, who made his legend by winning five championships for Edmonton's dynasty in the 1980s, explain how even an All-Star goalie can awaken one day with his groove gone forever. Says Fuhr, "With a veteran goalie, the mind will give out a lot faster than the body. Once a goalie loses that confidence, he can't ever get it back. Once you begin to doubt yourself, you're done."

Which brings us to the hardest question of Roy's career: Might Colorado's money goaltender be mentally bankrupt?

After surpassing 125 playoff victories, far more than any other netminder in NHL history, Roy came to the unsettling conclusion that, "It's never enough." An uncomfortable lump grew in his throat and it made Roy choke. The pressure finally began to weigh on him. His pads felt like 50 pounds of stone. On the ice, his breath quickly grew uncomfortably short. Too often, particularly in a 4-3 loss to Los Angeles that opened the Avs' second-round series with a stumble, Roy fumbled for the puck like a man trying to find car keys lost in the snow. He no longer appeared unbeatable. He looked old. There were unkind whispers around Denver that echoed the doubts in Roy's mind.

"Do the people want me to retire?" Roy asks, daring to utter aloud a premier athlete's worst fear. "Why would they want that? Do they think I cannot do it any more?"

The cocky rookie who in 1986 won the Cup for the Canadiens as much with chutzpah and charisma as with his glove and stick can no longer be found inside Avalanche sweater No.33. Roy has lost the ability to dominate a game by the sheer force of his will. He knows it.

"At one point in my life, I thought I needed arrogance," Roy admits. Almost as much as the winning, acts of braggadocio defined him. There was the delightfully brutal verbal dusting Roy once gave Jeremy Roenick during the playoffs, insisting that he couldn't hear Roenick's taunts because he had his own Stanley Cup rings in his ears. And what fan of old-time hockey could forget Roy, with the flair of a pro wrestler, instigating a toe-to-toe smackdown at center ice with Red Wings goalie Chris Osgood?

Now, though, those confrontations are but fine souvenirs. These days, Roy regards overt defiance as a bad waste of energy better spent focusing on the puck. Has he grown wiser, or is he just too damn tired to keep dragging his cockiness onto the ice? "Probably," he says, "a little of both."

Roy has earned the right to be weary. He has spent more than 12,000 minutes -- more than eight full days of his life -- standing sentry during the NHL playoffs. That's a long time to be a target. "How many times have you seen a goalie give up a bad score, and then watched all the players on the bench just go pffft?" Roy says. "If you're the man, you'd like to be perfect at all times." The tricky part for Roy was learning how to forgive the sin of being less than perfect. Arrogance made it nearly impossible.

Once, Roy dared shooters to beat him with a shot between his legs. Now, he no longer passes out such smug invitations. The goalie who transformed the butterfly technique into an art form has humbly decided to keep his skates a little closer together, so as not to be the victim of red-faced moments, like when Los Angeles winger Nelson Emerson dribbled a feeble backhand shot between Roy's wobbly knees in Game 1 of the series against the Kings.

A big head is a luxury Roy can no longer afford. The mind-set he now brings into the playoffs demonstrates an ego on a strict budget. "There was a time when I would do absolutely anything to win," Roy says. "But I don't feel like I have to prove anything to anybody now. I just want to give my teammates a chance to win. The phrase that keeps coming up in my mind is: One save at a time." Alone at night with his thoughts of another Stanley Cup, there's one so humble you'd never think it would enter Roy's mind: "Don't let me be the one who screws up."

A further peek inside the man reveals nostalgia that only confirms his advancing age. Roy is the curator of a complete visual catalogue of every impossible save and critical win from his glory days. "I've got a little movie of them all in my head," he says. This storage of personal triumphs is more efficient than CD-ROM. Without closing those blue eyes, Roy can recall every beautiful detail of his very first Game 7 victory in the NHL, against the Hartford Whalers more than 15 years ago. But ask him to rewind the heartbreaking playoff losses, and Roy claims, "There's nothing. I don't know what you're talking about."

Told of Roy's highly selective memory, Fuhr chuckles. "Come playoff time in the NHL, you make just one mistake as a goalie, and you lose," Fuhr says. "So, if you're going to play goalie in this league for a long time, you have to become great at forgetting." But that's precisely Roy's most gnawing problem. Due for free agency this summer, he desperately wants to finish his career with the Avalanche. As he plays for the last big financial score of his career, however, Roy admits the critiques of every subpar performance, bashings he once so readily ignored, are becoming increasingly hard to forget, while his miscues become easier to repeat. He misjudged a shot from just inside the blue line by Glen Murray that allowed the Kings a 1-0, double-overtime victory in Game 6, forcing another go-on or go-home situation for a goalie who's running out of time to come up big.

"Let's not kid ourselves," Roy says, evoking the practical wisdom of an old gunslinger who knows exactly how many bullets are left in his gun. "I'm not at the beginning of my career or at the middle of my career. I'm at the end."

The surprise is that rather than dreading his hockey mortality, Roy finds it liberating, because he has discovered this wild playoff ride can be as fun at the last turn as during the first, heady rise. Comfortable with being less than invincible, the Colorado veteran has put away his childish conceits. Roy now sees hockey simply as a difficult labor of love. Certainly, he is less of a goalie than he once was. But now, he'd rather be a man in full.

Maybe true confidence is being honest enough to admit your shortcomings. Ask Roy if he feels duty-bound to carry Colorado to a championship, and the instant reply is: "No, not at all." (Although that burden may soon return with the Avs having to face St. Louis without Peter Forsberg, Colorado's best player.) He places more trust in defensive teammates than he did five years ago, if for no other reason than he has little choice. He can still steal a playoff win, if not an entire series, yet accepts the fact that he must now carefully pick his spots for larceny. He was rock-steady in Colorado's 5-1 victory that finally eliminated the Kings in Game 7. He may even qualify as the difference in that series, stopping 103 of L.A.'s last 106 shots. And he did so without loud bravado. His confidence is mature, and must occasionally stop for a rest.

What's the French word for the way Roy approaches the game now? "Confiance," he says, then spells the word out. At age 35, the star goalie discovered how to save himself. This time, this crunch time, Roy retired his arrogance and plays on.

This article appears in the May 28 issue of ESPN The Magazine.