T. J. Oshie

“I always wanted to try to be the best at everything, whether that was being a 200-foot forward, being the best defensive forward on the team, being the best offensive forward on the team.”

“My dream as a kid was always to win the Stanley Cup. There's nothing else like it and there's no better feeling that raising it above your head.”

“Just to have friends away from the rink and talk about things unrelated to hockey is awesome.”

“I'll sit at the computer at night and try to look up old Ojibwe symbols, and I always tinker with maybe doing something with the language and really just trying to be more part of it.”

“Coaches have always told me, 'Shoot the puck, shoot the puck,' but they never necessarily told me where I'm getting my scoring chances from.”

“There's been a million times where I've gotten hit, I go to the ref and say I've gotten hit in the head. The ref just says, 'He's bigger than you.' That's the way it goes.”

“My mom told her dad, my grandpa Dexter, who she was dating and sure enough he was like 'Oh, one my best friends in the Navy was a Richard Oshie.' And she said, 'Yeah, that's his dad.'”

“Ever since I was a kid, my dad, he'd watch a lot of sports - really all sports. I just remember I'd watch for about five minutes and then I'd rather go outside and play, and play that sport.”

“My favorite thing to watch is golf. Even if it's the Masters, if I watch for a couple of hours, I'll end up grabbing the clubs and heading to the course and miss the second half of the broadcast.”

“From day one, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone has always been around.”

“My grandparents were in the military and so is a cousin of mine, and a close buddy, so when I heard the word 'hero,' it didn't really seem like what I am.”

“It was always important to me to see kids and try to put smiles on their faces.”

“I've heard 'Oshie, Sochi,' and stuff like that.”

“When everyone is playing the same way, maybe that doesn't matter as much. But when they're a couple of guys that are inconsistent, kind of how I was before, and you keep switching up the lines, it almost compounds the problem.”

“When I play 'NHL '09,' I play as the Blues and my guy is just terrible. I feel embarrassed when he's out there. He's slow, every time he gets touched he falls down.”

“I wish I spoke a different language. I think it's so cool seeing the guys in the locker room be able to communicate and the rest of us have no idea what they're saying.”

“It's something I work on every once in a while. I'll skate around the neutral zone and have one of our assistants fire pucks into my skates and I'll figure out a way to handle them. I think it's a good skill to have, and something you don't think about that you should work on.”

“From shift to shift, I just want to go out there and whatever the task is at hand, get the job done.”