TORONTO -- Joe Sakic had a big night in the Air Canada Centre on Thursday, worthy of a shower of hats. That's not unique in hockey, of course, but in the dress-up, formal spirit of the evening at the televised NHL Awards in Toronto, the crowd should have tossed derbies.

	Joe Sakic doesn't mind the superstar money, but he could do without the spotlight.

The Colorado Avalanche center won the Hart Trophy as the player adjudged the most valuable to his team, and the Lady Byng Trophy, for sportsmanship and gentlemanly play. He finished second to the Devils' John Madden in voting for the Selke Trophy, designed to go to the top defensive forward. He was the first player nominated for three awards since Ed Belfour in 1991. Earlier on Thursday in a ceremony at the Hockey Hall of Fame, he also was named the winner of the Lester B. Pearson Award - the Players Association's version of the MVP. That award from his peers deserved to be considered, and so his three-trophy day qualified as a hat trick.

That night, when he met with the media after the ceremony, and he greeted some reporters in the room before fielding questions, gloved attendants placed four trophies -- the Hart, Lady Byng, Pearson and Lord Stanley's departure present to Canada -- on the table around him. But a photographer in the back of the room cut him off.

"Move the big one!" snapped the photographer.

The darned Stanley Cup was in the way.

An attendant shuffled around the tropies, so as Sakic talked, the Hart Trophy was perilously hanging over one edge of the table.

"I couldn't imagine a better week in hockey," Sakic said.

And he even made it through the speeches. Next week, to unwind form it all, he is headed off to Disney World with his family -- wife Debbie and their three children.

Contrary to the image often portrayed by some of us at laptop computers, Sakic is neither shy nor incapable of extended discourse. His ironic and mischievous sense of humor have claimed as many victims as his quick-draw wrist shot during his 13-season NHL career. "Quoteless Joe" -- that's his nickname, and he's darned proud of it -- is calculatingly bland. But he also is a bit uncomfortable in formal settings.

In the five days since the Avalanche claimed the Stanley Cup, and the Colorado captain made the quick handoff to Ray Bourque, Sakic had a lot of practice at speechmaking -- including addressing a crowd estimated at 250,000 in Denver's Civic Center plaza on Monday.

The awards were different. The focus was on Sakic as an individual, and that makes him the most uncomfortable of all. Yes, an element of that is hockey protocol, which thankfully discourages the sort of "there is an 'I' in team" egoism that is ruining the other winter major-league sport. But his reaction also was largely genuine. He is fully willing to luxuriate in the seven-figure trappings of superstardom, yet would prefer to avoid the spotlight. That's not hypocrisy; it's just the way he is.

Only the Selke loss to Madden "spoiled" a clean sweep for Sakic, who had one more first-place vote in the writers' balloting, but was outpointed. Yet even Sakic probably would agree -- if he allowed himself to be pinned down -- that he shouldn't have been a finalist for all three awards. That's not a knock on Sakic, but the process, especially involving the Selke Trophy. It was created in tribute to Frank Selke, but also to get Bob Gainey an award when he might have been the best all-around player (or at least the most effective at what he did) in the NHL.

The evolution of strategy, which now leads to using a defensive pairing as the primary tool against a top line, has warped the award's standards. With top lines so often against top lines, the award now usually honors two-way play. Madden was a more conventional nominee, given the trophy's traditions, but even he isn't the top defensive forward on his own team. Unquestionably, though, Sakic was a worthy choice for the Hart Trophy, even for the semantic watchdogs who take the "most valuable to his team" definition as an inflexible mandate. Applied too literally, that almost could rule out someone on an elite team; as the Avalanche showed in the final two rounds of the playoffs, not even Peter Forsberg is indispensable.

After a slow and frustrating start, Sakic had an MVP season. Under virtually any standard. His work between Alex Tanguay and Milan Hejduk helped get his young wingers to the next level. He bedeviled goalies himself. He paid attention to the dirty details up and down the ice, and -- in his own effective fashion -- he was a leader on a team full of decisive voices. And this was his most underrated contribution: He didn't allow his contract status to become a dressing-room issue. Sakic was in a contract year, facing possible unrestricted free agency on July 1, but he politely refused to talk about it all season. Sakic and the Avalanche, and John LeClair and the Flyers, showed there is a classy way to handle it; contrast that to what happened between Rob Blake and the Kings.

"I don't find it a big deal, and I don't think it ever should be an issue," Sakic said. "There are too many issues about contracts in sports, and it drives everybody nuts. It really shouldn't be an issue, I don't think. It's simple. You have your deal, and you don't worry about it until your deal is over. And then you deal with things."

We won't be naive: Not that there's anything wrong with it, but Sakic is capable of financial ruthlessness as well. He was perfectly willing to accept that $21-million, three-year offer from the Rangers that included a $15-million upfront payment designed to make it difficult for the cash-starved Avalanche ownership at the time to match. And when the Avs matched, Sakic didn't put the check through the washing machine. He made $7.9 million this season under a one-year deal reached hours before he and the Avs were scheduled for an arbitration hearing. His agent is Don Baizley, who also represents Paul Kariya and Peter Forsberg, whose $10 million salaries were the highest in the league this season. Sakic will be seeking to at least match Forsberg's salary, and probably surpass it.

So, yes, it's conceivable that Sakic could test the market after July 1 and sign with someone else.

New Avalanche owner Stan Kroenke is basking in the Stanley Cup experience, and while he has expressed misgivings about the economic disparity and realities of the NHL, he will be flexible enough with general manager Pierre Lacroix - who also has to cope with the unrestricted free agencies of Patrick Roy, Rob Blake and Jon Klemm -- to make a Sakic re-signing likely. All things equal, or even close to being equal, he would like to return. The Avs will have to do some prioritizing in their championship offseason, but it all adds up to Sakic sticking with the franchise he has been with since day one of his NHL career.

The catch is that Lacroix continues to insist that the Avs don't give no-trade clauses. Sakic would be an idiot not to insist on one in the bargaining. Why would any player skip a test test of the open market and/or accept "less" than he could get elsewhere to stay with his current team if the GM can turn around and trade him to Columbus? Sakic has crossed the age threshholds for no-trade clauses and unrestricted free agency under the collective bargaining agreement, and it isn't unmitigated greed to take advantage of the leverage they give him. Roy had a three-month no-trade period in his last contract, but that's as far as Lacroix has gone with the Avalanche.

Lacroix truly believes no-trade clauses devalue players as "commodities." Yet nobody would begrudge a Sakic exception, and Lacroix even could couch it in terms that wouldn't make it an exception. He could tell everyone, agents included, that the Avalanche will consider no-trade clauses for all 31 year olds who: a) were drafted by the franchise; b) have been with it their entire careers; c) have won a Hart Trophy; and, d) captained at least two Stanley Cup champions.

"Next week, we're going on a family vacation and we might be able to sit down and relax and talk about what's in store for us," Sakic said. If everything works out and I'm back, that would be something we've always wanted. We've always said we would love to stay in Denver and finish our career there. We'll see how everything unfolds. Deb's going to have some input in it too." Sakic smiled, then added, "She'll probably have more input than me."

Regardless of the way this works out, Sakic's story is hearteningly typical of the NHL, with elements of the international nature of the talent pool and the Canadian roots of the game. His father, Marijan -- now known as Mario to most of his friends -- left Croatia (when it was part of Yugoslavia) as a teen-ager, escaping into Austria and then traveling in steerage on a ship to Quebec City.

Then he traveled by train to Vancouver, settled in, married a Croatian-Canadian woman, Slavica, and began a family. He worked in a variety of trades, most notably as a stonemason and carpenter. The son, Joseph, spoke Croatian in the home until he started school, and by then, he was trying out the Canadian sport. He proved to be good at it. Eventually, it allowed him to buy his parents a luxurious home in White Rock, British Columbia.

"My dad taught us that talking meant nothing, that working hard is the only way you'll get where you want to go," Sakic said.

Terry Frei of The Denver Post is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. His feedback email address is ChipHilton23@hotmail.com.