When word hit social media circles early Wednesday afternoon Stuart Skinner was in the starter’s crease for the Pittsburgh Penguins in Calgary against the Flames … well, spoiler alerts don’t get much better.

Odds are high Skinner will not face his former team tonight, the Edmonton Oilers.

So fans won’t see him in a goalie’s crease at Rogers Place. But rather sitting at the end of the Penguins bench. Baseball cap, of course.

Wherever Skinner is, one thing is certain — Kleenex is required.

For this is not merely another netminder making a routine occupational migration in the peripatetic world of professional hockey.

This is a Sherwood Park son coming home, a young man whose very essence embodies the prairie values of authenticity, humility, and that increasingly rare commodity in modern athletics: genuine humanity.

The waterworks, one suspects, could rival the great floods of biblical proportions.

Because Skinner isn’t just a goaltender who happened to play in Edmonton; he was — is — Edmonton, in every meaningful sense of the........

© Edmonton Sun