Nine minutes into the third period, Ryan Jackman scores a goal to knot the game at 4. "Tie Game! Tie Game!" he shouts as the other 7-year-olds offer their gloved palms in a round of high-fives.

	Georges Laraque works with inner-city youth hockey players in Harlem, part of the NHL's Diversity Task Force initiative.

It's Saturday morning and the Mt. Vernon Ice Skating and Hockey Club is taking on rival Mamaroneck. Mt. Vernon is among 30 youth hockey programs across the North America in the NHL/USA Hockey Diversity Task Force, which was designed to coax economically disadvantaged kids onto the ice. But today's game, though highly spirited, isn't exactly ethnically diverse. Both teams are comprised only of white players.

Later that night, Team USA skates to a 2-2 tie with Russia at the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake. In that game, every NHL player on the ice is also white. Some 22 years after the U.S.'s celebrated "Miracle on Ice," many might call the ultimate goal of the Diversity Task Force -- successful integration of one of the nation's whitest sports -- an even more unlikely occurrence.

So enter Willie O'Ree, hockey's designated miracle worker. Forty-four years after he became the first black man ever to play in the NHL, O'Ree is now blazing another trail as the Diversity Task Force's director of youth development, a position he has held for the past four years.

	Willie O'Ree

From Anaheim to Harlem, from Tampa to Detroit, and in the near future New Orleans, he oversees a program that helps kids learn to skate, handle the puck and embrace the hockey culture. Through the programs, the NHL and USA Hockey hope to give inner-city kids an opportunity to play a sport to which few have been introduced. Despite its blue-collar nature, hockey carries a white-collar price tag.

Edmonton's Georges Laraque, one of 13 black players currently on NHL team rosters and a member of the league's diversity committee, says he believes the high cost of playing hockey limits the game's access for minorities. "Parents put their kids in other sports because it's cheaper to buy basketball sneakers than it is hockey equipment." He's right. The average cost to outfit a player in gear from head to toe, complete with pads, sticks, gloves, skates and more, can be as much as $400 a player. "It's just not possible for a lot of parents to pay that much," Laraque says.

The goal of the Diversity Task Force, O'Ree says, is not inspired by purely athletic motivation, but the elimination of social and economic barriers. "A lot of inner-city kids do inline skating and they already play street hockey," he says. "But we need to get more people of color on the ice."

That's already happened in Harlem. Of the 189 players in the Ice Hockey in Harlem program, 55 percent are Hispanic, 45 percent black. A lot of the equipment players use is supplied by corporate sponsors like Nike and the money used to pay for expensive ice time, which costs as much as $200 an hour, comes from community donations and fund-raising events.

The integration of any facet of society is never a bad thing. Whether it is Jackie Robinson breaking baseball's color barrier or Tiger Woods winning The Masters, the power of inclusion ultimately extends beyond any playing field.

Woods has lifted the nation's interest in golf with the same force he lifts a golf ball into the fairway. And golf is more inclusive because of him. His enormous presence has given the sport a distinct, if not limited, hip quotient. Yet while golf's elitist, country-club atmosphere may never be home to the inner-city child of color, at least for some it's no longer entirely foreign soil.

	Willie O'Ree broke the color barrier in the NHL with the Boston Bruins in 1958.

That O'Ree broke hockey's color barrier was anything but a harbinger of great cultural change to come on the ice. Unlike in the years after Robinson broke baseball's color barrier, when the eventual flood of emancipated players made their way to the major leagues from the negro leagues, there did not exist a similar number of black players who were awaiting their opportunity to play professional hockey. There was no Larry Doby, Satchel Paige or Josh Gibson to follow O'Ree.

It wasn't until 1974, 15 years after O'Ree paved the way, that a second black player, Mike Marson, followed him to the NHL. And only 31 players of African descent have played in the league.

"You look at hockey a few years ago, and it's come a long way," Laraque says. "But it will never be like football or basketball."

Jarome Iginla says he never saw the rink as off limits. Entering the Olympic break, the Calgary Flames center was leading the league in goals -- the first time a black man had ever held that distinction in the NHL. Born and raised in Edmonton, Iginla never saw the NHL's lack of diversity as a barrier and he has much respect for hockey's two most prominent trailblazers. "Willie O'Ree is the Jackie Robinson of hockey," Iginla says. "And Grant Fuhr was always my favorite player."

Iginla says he'd like to expand the game the same way O'Ree has done as a professional player and youth organizer. "As a kid, it was my dream to be in the NHL," he says. " It was good to have those guys to look up to. I want to be that guy for kids today."

Laraque is definitely feeling that. To encourage interaction with fans, the Oilers' right winger includes his e-mail address next to his picture on the team's Web site. "You have to make yourself available to kids," he says.

That's not just lip service for Laraque. During the All-Star break he traveled to Lethbridge, Alberta, to counsel Nathan Barrett and Jeremy Jackson, two black players in major junior hockey. "Jeremy has his own style," Laraque says. "He listens to Tupac and he's into R&B, and some people might have a problem with him because of that." Laraque's advice to Jackson was simple: "I told him never to change his personality or his style."

O'Ree took a similar stance more than 40 years ago. Determined not to be run out of the league, O'Ree stood his ground with a frontiersman-like determination. "I had a lot of fights not because I wanted to," he says, "but because I had to."

Having grown up in Fredericton, New Brunswick, an area of Canada known for its racial harmony, O'Ree says he didn't experience open hostility because of his skin color until he entered the NHL. "The fact that I was black never came up when we played as kids," O'Ree wrote in his autobiography, "The Willie O'Ree Story: Hockey's Black Pioneer." "You could have been purple with a green stripe down the middle of your forehead and it wouldn't have mattered. It was only later, when I became older, that I learned what 'color barrier' meant."

O'Ree, who played just 45 games in the NHL, said he regularly heard racial slurs whenever he would play in New York, Detroit or Chicago, three of the stops in the then six-team NHL. Once, during a game at Chicago Stadium, a Blackhawks player taunted him with racial remarks and later hit O'Ree in the mouth with the butt-end of his stick. The blow knocked out two of O'Ree's teeth and nearly ignited a riot in the stands.

Several of today's black players say they rarely deal with overt racism. In fact, many of them say race isn't an issue at all. "There's some prejudice in Canada, too," O'Ree says. "But it's not as severe as in the United States."

Still, racial bias in both the U.S. and Canada can take on an insidious nature these days, hovering above the sports horizon like a societal stealth bomber. Often, it can be as simple as an oversight. Yet whether intentional or otherwise, it nonetheless can become the subtlest form of censorship.

	Willie O'Ree and Grant Fuhr, center, were on hand to celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday when the St. Louis Blues and Edmonton Oilers, the NHL's two most diverse teams, played on Jan. 15.

For proof of that, look no further than the Hockey Hall of Fame. Unlike its baseball, basketball and football counterparts, the Hockey Hall of Fame does not have a display to commemorate its sport's integration. Though it does have the hockey stick O'Ree used in his second game with the Boston Bruins, the lone piece of O'Ree memorabilia in the Hall's possession, fans can't see it. With 2,600 square feet devoted to a Wayne Gretzky tribute, there just isn't room for it to be displayed, a spokesperson told ESPN.com.

To date, no black player has been inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. Fuhr, who crouched in goal during the Edmonton Oilers' dynasty in the '80s, seems the likely candidate to become the first. But having retired only a season ago, Fuhr, the first black player to have his name etched onto the Stanley Cup, will have to wait another two years before becoming eligible for election. Until then, his goalie mask remains one of the few items of a black hockey player that the Hall does have on display today, though it's part of a tribute to the Oilers' dynasty and not as recognition of the game's most prolific black pioneer.

O'Ree waves off the omissions. "Oh, Grant will be in there one day," he says. But for now, O'Ree prefers to dwell on the present. He describes sitting next to Fuhr during a Blues-Oilers game, back on Jan. 15 in St. Louis, as a purely sacred moment. "There were seven black players on the ice at one time," he says. "What a wonderful feeling that was."

Do you believe in miracles?

Alan Grant is a staff writer for ESPN The Magazine