It doesn't seem as if 10 years have passed. Since hearing the news that "Badger" Bob Johnson had finally slipped away, had succumbed to cancer. The news was expected, but nevertheless numbing. One of the game's indelible personalities was gone. The disease may have eaten away at his mind and body, but it could never touch his spirit.

	Bob Johnson coached Wisconsin to NCAA titles and Mario Lemieux to a Stanley Cup.

A couple of months before, the Badger, in a wheelchair and overseen by a male nurse, made a heroic journey to McNichols Arena in Denver to be at an exhibition game between the Calgary Flames and Pittsburgh Penguins, the two teams he'd coached in the NHL. The trip was excruciating for him, but there was nowhere else on Earth he would be, could be. The first sight of him was jarring. Thin, one arm slumped to one side of the chair, the other in a sling. But he was in his element, a hockey arena, and surrounded by his people.

He couldn't speak but his eyes were bright and curious despite a pulverizing 90-minute radiation treatment before being whisked to Denver from his home in Colorado Springs via ambulance.

After the initial shock, taking in the devastation imposed on his body, a sense of pride swelled up in whoever was fortunate enough to be allowed in and see him that night. Pride in knowing such a courageous man.

"Whenever I think of him," former Calgary GM Cliff Fletcher said a decade ago, "I'll smile. It was fun going to work in the morning knowing he'd be there. It didn't matter how down you were, how bad you felt, he could pick you up.

"Badger was like medicine."

So many memories of such a unique personality flooded the brain back then, as they do again now, 10 years after his death on Nov. 26, 1991. How he always had notebooks. The seven-point plan he devised to beat mighty Edmonton; how people laughed, but how it worked to shattering effect in 1986. His responding to a franchise-setting 11-game losing streak in Calgary by saying: "I'm tired of people talking about our so-called slump!" How he'd rant about his days in the medical corps in Korea, and draw a map of the place that looked like a crushed-in pancreas on the dressing room strategy board for illustration. How he'd be the first person off the team bus in the dead of night, leaving wife Martha to struggle with the luggage. That trademark tug on his schnozolla. How he took all his Calgary notebooks with him to Pittsburgh ("Every game, every goal, every hit. Like a refresher course when you're going to take the law review"). The time he dressed up his third-string goalie in Oilers' garb to simulate game conditions during playoffs, prompting Glen Sather to snipe: "What do you expect from a college coach?"

Johnson's retort? "I was coaching against the Russians when he was still in diapers."

Or the night the Flames ended a long drought at the Montreal Forum, but all Badger could find to talk about was how Claude Mouton, the PA announcer, had changed Gary Suter into a Sutter. "It's ... it's ... it's ... a hockey tragedy!" he bellowed.

You missed the trademark slaps on the arm after he'd gone. The analogies of hockey to climbing mountains and various championship golf courses (if the Montreal Forum was like playing the Masters at Augusta, say, then lesser rinks were the Greater Hartford Open). The nutritional xeroxed handouts he'd provide, long before anyone else was doing it. The way he'd go on about running by the Bow River that morning when all he really wanted was to be recognized on the jogging path, and talk hockey or sign autographs.

This was a man consumed by the game. He once said of coaching it: "Coaching is like living in a cave. You're committed to it 24 hours a day. But after eight or nine months the coach can venture out into the day, out of the dark of the cave. He looks to his left and looks to his right and there it is ... the real world!"

Some people looked at him and shook their heads, as if he were the Nutty Professor. He certainly didn't lack for ego or confidence, but there was an ingratiating naivete about his enthusiasm that couldn't help but win you over. He had time for anyone interested in hockey.

	With any team -- including the 1976 U.S. Olympic quad -- Bob Johnson's enthusiasm was infectious.

"I just think he loved the game," once said current Washington assistant coach Tim Hunter. "No, love isn't the proper word. It went beyond love.

"He had this lust for the game."

Bob Johnson left a legacy of unflinching optimism; of putting together one of U.S. college hockey's greatest programs at Wisconsin; of fashioning a prohibitive underdog team in Calgary into a unit capable of dethroning the Oiler dynasty, if only for a year; of finally coaching a Stanley Cup winner in Pittsburgh; of the phrase "It's a great day for hockey!"

When you think of it, that's quite a contribution. Florida assistant coach Paul Baxter loves the story of Johnson showing up at the Saddledome one morning, insisting he'd undergone nine temperature changes before 10:30.

"He'd got up, gone out to the mailbox for the paper," recalled Baxter. "It was cold outside. One temperature change. Came back into the house, that's two. Had a shower, switched the water from hot to cold. Four. Out the shower, got cleaned up, shaved, ready to go down to the rink. Five. Got in the car and turned on the heater. Another temperature change. Out of the car ... seven. Inside the rink, eight. Got undressed and went into the sauna to think.

"'That's nine, NINE, temperature changes, before 10:30!' he hollered.

"Naturally, we couldn't believe what we'd just heard."

Everyone, it seems, has a Bob Johnson story. Former Flame left winger Colin Patterson is no exception.

"I'd played four or five games in a row, a real run for me at the time, and was pretty pleased with the way things were going," he remembered.

So when C.J. (Coach Johnson) called him over Patterson was ready for effusive praise.

"I expected a pat on the back, words of encouragement, something to really pump me up. He puts his arm around me and I think 'Great!' You know what he said? 'Patterson ... get me some red sweaters, will ya?'"

One morning, early, say 6:30 a.m., as the players snoozed on bus heading to another airport for another game, Johnson spotted a construction worker out in the street wielding a jackhammer.

"Look at that!" he exclaimed, jarring everyone awake. "Consider yourself lucky. You could be that guy out there in the dark, in the cold. Instead you're in here on a nice warm bus! Don't you feel lucky?!"

	“	Badger paved the way for Americans to play at (the NHL) level. Before guys like him, hockey was a Canadians-only game. People like him had lot to do with guys like me making it to the NHL. ”
		— Gary Suter

Suter recalls the day Badger strode into the dressing room and asked, "'How ya feelin', Suter?' So I say: 'A 10 coach.' Then he goes over, punches Joel Otto in the arm and asks him the same thing. Joel says: 'An 11, coach.'

"So he turns around, glares at me and yells: 'So, Suter, what the hell's the matter with you?'"

Players still talk about the night in the spring of '85 that Johnson announced to the Flames, down 3-1 in games in a series to Edmonton and preparing for Game 6 and what appeared to be certain annihilation at Northlands Coliseum: "We've got 'em right where we want 'em!"

Crazy thing was, the man meant it.

"Badger paved the way for Americans to play at (the NHL) level," added Suter, who missed Johnson at Wisconsin, but played under him for two seasons in Calgary. "Before guys like him, hockey was a Canadians-only game. People like him had lot to do with guys like me making it to the NHL.

"We owe him a lot."

Cliff Fletcher had it right. Think of the Badger and it's impossible not to smile.

Which is why, thinking back all these years later, to that early fall night at McNichols, when Badger Bob was so sick, yet so himself, it's impossible not to still be impressed by his indomitable spirit.

A visitor took Bob Johnson's hand as he prepared to leave.

"See you coach," the visitor said, trying to be positive, as positive as the Badger would be. "Later in the season, huh?"

Bob Johnson touched the visitor's sleeve, made an effort to scribble something on his notepad. Always a notepad ... "Playoffs" is what he had scrawled.

Ten years later, the visitor hasn't forgotten that night. Doesn't think he ever will.

George Johnson of the Calgary Herald is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.