CEDAR PARK, Texas – Game night, and the goalie paused in his doorway – 6 feet 4 inches, 212 pounds and a faithless left knee backlit against the amber glow of a townhouse leased for seven months to last the hockey season.

He was in no hurry. Hurry brought only trouble. Behind him, a staircase still draped in Christmas bunting led up toward the pink bathroom with Cinderella shower curtains where his wife of five years was supervising the bedtime routines of their two daughters, the oldest almost ready for kindergarten and maybe a less-itinerant life.

"Goodnight, hon," called the goalie, Brent Krahn, at 27 one of the oldest men on the roster of the Texas Stars, the minor league affiliate of the Dallas Stars.

Nine years had passed, nine seasons on nine teams in nine cities, a disconcertingly feline number of chances since the summer of 2000, when he was drawn into the professional system as a first-round draft pick of the Calgary Flames.

This was what his father told the Calgary Sun on the eve of the draft all those hockey seasons ago: "It's really something for me, because when I was a kid, I'd dream maybe one day to play in the NHL. Now maybe I can live it through him."

Dreams: Everyone has them. The one assigned to Brent Krahn, goalie, took hold on a backyard rink in Winkler, Manitoba, where his father got a discount from working at the sporting goods store. He has followed it all the way to Texas.

"When you love something so much with all your heart, you just can't walk away," said his wife, Marcia. "You'll always be wondering, did you give it your all? I guess that's why they call it a dream, you know? It's the unreachable, but you've got to keep trying your best to reach it."

It is easy to forget, in all the reaching, that you are not alone. If Brent Krahn, goalie, would call home to the prairies of western Canada more often, he would know that his cousin's sons, ages 5 and 7, have colored over the red of their old Brent Krahn Calgary Flames player cards with the green of the Dallas Stars.

He would know that those boys sit in front of the TV on Friday nights fighting over who gets to be Brent Krahn on the hockey video game. He would know that his father, Robert Krahn, sits in front of the computer to watch every Texas Stars game on streaming video. He would know that his mother, Kathy Krahn, appeals for divine intervention on his behalf, asking God: "Give him the strength to keep going through all the trials, all the ups and downs. Give him the strength to be the person you want him to be."

The only person Brent Krahn ever wanted to be, by his own account, was the person hidden behind a cage mask and helmet, weighed down with elbow, shin and shoulder pads, teetering on ice skates in a 60-minute nightly campaign to stand in front of every 6-ounce slab of vulcanized hard rubber sent skittering his way at 80 mph, with a flashing red light and siren behind his back set to alert a crowded arena to his every mistake.

He wanted to be the goalie.

He wanted it as a 9-year-old member of the Winkler Flyers, playing in old airplane hangars over ice cooled by the outside air. He wanted it on a Triple-A midget squad sponsored by the local video store. He wanted it when he saw the great Ed Belfour ascend from small-town Manitoba to contend for the 1992 Stanley Cup. He wanted it the day he stuck a poster of all the NHL goalies to his bedroom wall, and on the night Belfour and the Chicago Blackhawks fell to the hated Pittsburgh Penguins, he cried real tears and scribbled out the picture of the Penguins goalie on the poster and wanted it.

On this rainy night in January, free-blanket night at the new arena in the northwest suburbs of Austin, Krahn did not expect to be the goalie. Recovering from the fourth surgery of his career, he had spent the week watching his teammates skate, walking on the treadmill and coming home to a nap with his girls.

He stood there in his good suit, collar open, carrying a bag of dirty diapers. He did not look over his shoulder. He climbed into his Lincoln Navigator, the only one in the parking lot with a child seat and Wild Rose Country plates. He dropped off the diapers, purchased coffee with milk and started driving down a road called New Hope to the Avenue of the Stars, where the Cedar Park Center dominates a landscape of housing developments incubating countless dreams.

The trials of a professional athlete, he knew by now, hold little mystique for those acquainted with office politics, factory shift assignments or beauty salon rivalries. Krahn could bore you with the story of the time he ended up fourth on the depth chart for the minor league Calgary Hitmen, behind their main guy, a backup and another prospect, but after awhile it would start to sound like the happy-hour lament of your buddy at Haynes and Boone or your girlfriend at American Airlines.

Just like any corporate worker standing tall before the human resources department, he had answered the probing questions of his prospective employers at the 2000 draft: Why did he deserve to play in the NHL? Did he have a girlfriend? Were his parents together? What did he see in some ink blots?

And he had earned the entry-level job of his dreams. All these years later, he still could recall the announcer's voice: "The Calgary Flames select ... from the Calgary Hitmen ... Brent Krahn."

He could remember, too, the awestruck feeling of arriving at training camp, 18 years old, carrying some baby fat, watching the famous players skate toward him. There was Jarome Iginla, scoring on him. There was Valeri Bure, scoring on him. And down he went for another year on the road with the lowly Hitmen.

Pretty soon life started happening to Brent Krahn, goalie. He dislocated his kneecap lunging for a shot out of reach. He met Marcia Cortez, a daughter of Chilean refugees, at a school for dropouts and correspondence students. She was trying to improve her college application; he was earning his diploma as a traveling athlete. He slouched through class, hat down over his eyes.

"I thought he was grumpy," she would later recall, "and he looked like a jerk."

On their first date, Krahn wore a button-down shirt, introduced himself to her father and opened doors. She fell in love. He wanted to focus on hockey. They broke up, they reconnected. Fate, they decided.

And why not start a family? Krahn had signed a $1.075 million contract to play in the National Hockey League. Even after Canadian income taxes, the money seemed sufficient to last through his rehabilitation.

In 2003, Krahn signed on for his fourth year with the Hitmen, playing in a league of aspirants where he was classified as "over-age." He was 21. Injured again, he put on a suit and sat in the stands and told well-meaning fans that, yes, thank you, his knee was starting to feel better. Sometimes the general manager would walk by and Krahn would lower his head in shame, thinking: "They're paying me to play."

But when he recovered, his performance stumbled. Before long he became a spectacle, at least in his own mind: This was the guy? This was the big goalie the Calgary Flames had picked ninth overall in the first round of the NHL draft?

"I was putting too much pressure on myself," Krahn said, "thinking I'm running out of time."

He took every minor league job offer, earning a five-figure salary in a business where careers are measured in years, not decades. Nearly every season brought a taste of success, a training camp or an exhibition game or a reserve slot in the NHL, where by 2005 the minimum salary was $450,000 and rising. A few NHL goalies have played into their 40s; the average age is 30.7. The dream was not far out of reach.

His young family crisscrossed the continent, living in hotels, packing for warm weather and repacking for cold. Daddy kept getting transferred at work; that was all. He took shifts for the Seattle Thunderbirds, the Las Vegas Wranglers, the Lowell Lock Monsters, the San Antonio Rampage, the Lowell Lock Monsters again, the Omaha Ak-Sar-Ben Knights, the Quad City Flames, the Las Vegas Wranglers again and the Chicago Wolves.

"When you're picked in the first round, you're expected to make it sooner," said Scott Allen, a coach who supervised Krahn on several of those squads. "He hid it well, probably to a downfall, because that stuff will weigh on a person's mind."

Teammates moved on; Krahn stayed behind. On the road he sat alone in hotel rooms. At home he stared at hockey games on cable TV.

"I wasn't able to check it at the door," Krahn said. "Hockey affected everything I did. If hockey wasn't going well, I was a jerk to the wife and kids. I had the hockey package, and I'd watch it every day, then go play it. Overload. Paralysis by analysis, ya know?"

He saw a psychologist. It helped, a little. Then he blew out his knee, again. After another surgery, he told himself not to hurry so much. His work improved.

Precinct captains are measured by homicide statistics, lawyers by billable hours and teachers by standardized test scores. For Krahn, a job opening in Dallas coincided with an uptick to 0.917 in a personal statistic called "save percentage."

So it was that on Valentine's Day 2009, a Saturday night heralded by Mayor Richard M. Daley as "Hockey Weekend in Chicago," before a capacity crowd of 22,704 at the United Center, Krahn stepped onto the ice to represent the Dallas Stars in the final period of a regular-season game in the National Hockey League. He was 26 years old. In a span of 20 minutes, the Chicago Blackhawks, idols of his childhood, took nine shots. Brent Krahn, goalie, missed three of them.

Now traffic slowed outside the Cedar Park Center.

"Man, a lot of people want free blankets tonight," Krahn said. Since that disastrous performance in Chicago, he had signed a $105,000 contract for one season with the minor league Texas Stars, winning 10 of 12 games, stopping 385 shots and earning an invitation to the minor league All-Star Game.

Then he had developed a hernia. For a goalie trying not to hurry, time was running out. He had surgery on Christmas Eve.

On this game night in January, Krahn parked his Navigator, walked to a service entrance, climbed the back stairs and sat in the press box next to another injured player. His coffee was turning cold from the milk.

Soon the lights of the arena dimmed. A strobe flashed. An announcer introduced the players and people cheered. There were fights and power plays and cheerleader interludes, but Krahn fixed his gaze on the goalie, watching where he stood, how he stood, how he came out to challenge the puck, how he held his head.

"Oh, good save!" Krahn called. The man making the saves was a year younger, his main rival for the big promotion to Dallas. But from this vantage, Krahn seemed only to see another kid from the prairies of western Canada, all grown up and running out of time, hidden behind a cage mask and helmet, weighed down with elbow, shin and shoulder pads, teetering on ice skates in front of 6,863 people at an indoor rink in Texas, following a dream, trying to be the goalie.