at a particular moment- the right to reimagine the grand narratives of hockey through your own idiosyncratic experience. But back on the other side of that line, things are different.  Nobody snarks about Rocket Richard or Howie Morenz anymore.  Nobody really challenges their legacy or reinterprets their achievements or even bothers to accuse them of diving.  The players who came before us we take as they are given, as a set of songs and stories, hockey cards and highlight reels.  Most of the time, we don't even think of them, but when we do, we think of them as archetypes rather than people.  They've been drained of their blood and pumped full of formaldehyde and reverence, not very much more human than their statues. Bobby Orr is right on the cusp of this transition.  He's ossifying before our very eyes. There are still several generations of fans who watched him play personally, but there are also several generations of fans who have no such experience. For half of us, he is a piece of living memory and for the other half he is already a legend. He is, at this exact moment, passing into myth.  To most hockey fans now, his hovering statue outside TD Garden is more him than his own 64-year-old body is. But of course Bobby Orr is one of those players who seems like he might have been a myth right from the beginning. The story is just too right, like a Canadian fairy tale that