Time catches up to all of us eventually. It's just how the world works. For professional athletes Time can be perhaps more cruel than normal. The slightest loss of speed or agility can spell the end of a career. An injury that seemed to heal in no time at the age of 18 can drag out for weeks at the age of 35. Hockey is a young man's game and the Oilers are a team full of young men, save for one who stands out as being the elder statesman of the group.

Ryan Smyth once came to Oiler training camp as a fresh faced 18 year old, the team's 6th Overall pick in the 1994 Entry Draft. He didn't make the club in the fall of 1994 but managed to stick the following year and hasn't looked back. Now, 19 years later, it's hard not to start thinking about the road he has traveled and how little of it is still left ahead of him.

Smyth enters camp this year with a lifetime's worth of experience to compensate for a lifetime's worth of wear and tear. He looks every bit the part of a man who has played 17 NHL seasons (one lost to lockout *spits on the floor*) standing in front of opposing defensemen and taking their punishment. His face is scarred, teeth missing, and it seems to take just a little bit more to move down the ice than it did as a teenager. OK, it takes a lot more to move down the ice than it did when he was a teenager.

Once upon a time, 94 was the best LW on the team and it was a matter of finding a Center for him to play with who could find him waiting at the side of the net for that tap in. Now it's a different story. The Oilers have Taylor Hall and David Perron patrolling the Port-side ahead of Smyth on the depth chart. So the man who made his living in the top 6 and on the top Power Play unit has been relegated to a bottom 6 role with diminished time on the 5v4. This is not altogether new. Since he arrived back to Edmonton he has been transitioning to this role.

He looked tired at the end of the 2011-2012 season, a sign that Time was creeping up on him. In 2013 he looked a half step slower still. Where will his game be for the 2013-2014 season? Many have already started suggesting that Smyth's time is over. He ought retire now before the proud man from Banff who won Olympic Gold for Canada really starts to embarrass himself out there.

Maybe those who wonder why he hasn't thrown in the towel are beginning to experience what it was like to try and defend Smyth in his heyday. No matter what punishment they delivered to him, and make no mistake they delivered it heaping doses, Smyth would not give in. No doubt at some point even they must have thought after they lost count of how many crosschecks they gave him, "Just quit. No one will blame you."

Except he cant.

There is something inherent to Ryan Smyth that will not allow him to give up. It is simply essential to his being. To have watched Smyth from the first time he slipped on the Oiler sweater to now is to know that he cannot give up. He can be beaten, he can lose, he can be relegated to the 4th line, but he cannot stop. Because this refusal to quit is so engrained into Smyth's being we likely wont get to see him walk away from the game gracefully.

What motivates him still at the age of 37 is guess work on my part. I would be willing to wager that even he doesn't quite know. He has made his money, more than 50 Million in NHL salary. He has played for his country so many times that he earned the nickname Captain Canada. He won Olympic Gold 2002. The one glaring omission on his resume is the missing Stanley Cup victory. It's difficult to say that winning the Cup is what motivates him though, not many looking for Cup rings would have traded themselves to Edmonton in the middle of their rebuild.

This may be the final year we could see Smytty in the NHL. Almost certainly this will be his final year as an Oiler. This is his Swan Song. Driven by some internal need to keep going or by a sense of unfinished business here in the City of Champions I'm not sure, but one thing I am sure of is that Time may be the only thing that can stop Ryan Smyth. Nothing else has yet.

Snapshots

- Smyth quite literally has a lifetime's experience. New Oiler Blue-Chip prospect Darnell Nurse was born the winter after the Oilers drafted Smytty.

- 94 has scored 376 NHL regular season goals. Probably 330 have come from 5 feet or less from the net but you can still count on him trying his patented 78 mph slapshot off the rush. It must have fooled a goalie once and he just cant give up trying it again.

- When he does hang his skates up the Oilers ought to honour Smyth's number. No, not retire it, honour it.

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