Valeri Vasiliev

And, you know, being a kid playing outside with the sticks and ball or puck sometimes without skates, you know, I just loved the feeling of being on the ice.

So, you know, the moment I, the coach came to our school and asked who wants to play hockey.

I was eight years old at that time.

And I was one of the first guys who joined the group.

But I want to kind of talk a little bit about that transition.

Like I know Lithuania is part of that Soviet Union, but were you just too good to continue to play there? Or how did that transition happen? Did somebody come in and say, hey, we got to get this guy and we got to get him playing on some of these better teams?

well because uh we participated in a national uh soviet union championship and uh we play against dinamo moscow which is a big club uh junior team and actually was playing on a two-year-old team so uh when they came to our town we're playing against dinamo moscow and i was at that time it was very physical already you know i think it was like 12 uh And I remember during the game, the coach from the other team, a very famous hockey player, one of the legends of Soviet hockey, Valery Vasiliev, came up to me on the bench during the game and asked me what was my name.

And the question he asked me, he said, if I want to play for Dynamo Moscow.