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Zach Hyman was just hitting his stride at the University of Michigan when Red Berenson, the legendary longtime coach of the Wolverines, came to him with an idea.

Hyman had turned in a career-high 17 points as a junior, playing alongside fellow future NHLers Andrew Copp and Tyler Motte, and had expected to stay on a line with them as he entered his final collegiate season. Berenson wanted to try something new.

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“I want to put you with this young kid Dylan, who we have great hopes for,” Hyman remembers Berenson telling him ahead of the 2014-15 season. “We think he’s going to be a great player, and we want you to play with him. You’re a senior, you have to mentor the younger guys.”

At the time, Hyman didn’t personally know Dylan Larkin, the incoming freshman from the U.S. National Team Development Program who the Detroit Red Wings drafted 15th overall that summer. But he was up for it.

As Hyman got to know his new centerman, he noticed the uncommon confidence and swagger he had about him as a freshman. At Michigan’s first practice, he also saw what’s impossible to miss: Larkin’s speed. That was one of Hyman’s best attributes too. The two figured they could skate around defenders, then work down low.

“It was crazy how fast we clicked, and how much chemistry we had from the start,” Hyman, now with the Maple Leafs, recalled by phone in December. “We didn’t look back. It was one of the most fun years I’ve had playing hockey.”

Hyman’s scoring skyrocketed to 54 points, more than tripling his total as a junior en route to being one of the top 10 finalists for the NCAA’s Hobey Baker Award. Larkin, even as a freshman, wasn’t far behind. He racked up 47 points in 35 games, propelling him to the NHL the very next season.

Looking back on that season now, with both players now in key roles for a pair of Original Six franchises, Hyman joked that he’ll always see Larkin as a kid because of their age and experience gap when they first met. The Larkin he first knew was the young guy in the locker room, smart enough not to barge in too hard and step on anyone’s toes.

But in the time since, Hyman had also seen from afar how Larkin has developed from those days in Ann Arbor. He’d noticed Larkin taking on more of a leadership role in Detroit.

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And so, while answering a series of questions about Larkin, Hyman also wound up posing one himself.

“I don’t think the Red Wings have a captain yet, right?” he asked.

By then, the answer to Hyman’s question felt inevitable. Five weeks later, Detroit general manager Steve Yzerman — himself the most legendary leader in franchise history — called Larkin in for a meeting to ask if he were willing to take on the responsibility of the Red Wings’ captaincy.

“Absolutely,” Larkin told him.

It was the latest storybook moment for Larkin, who was born in Waterford and has played his entire career in Michigan. He went from missing school for the Red Wings championship parade down Woodward in 2002, to being drafted by the team, and now captaining it. With an arc like that, it’s easy to wonder when, exactly, Larkin’s storybook road to the captaincy really began. When did he go from just one of the million faces in the crowd at that 2002 parade, to the franchise’s next, best hope at leading it to another?

But with a story like Larkin’s, nearly everything, in hindsight, feels like it may have been a sign of what was to come.

“Competitive” is among the first words those have coached or played with Larkin use to describe him. It’s the trait that has, perhaps more than any other, defined his rise in the NHL.

Larkin is many things on the ice: He’s fast, skilled and big, and already, at age 24, he has had seasons of 32 goals and 47 assists. Those around him believe someday he could contend for a Selke Trophy. Those are his visible traits. But the one underpinning all of them is the competitive fire that lives under the surface.

“Larks is as competitive a person as I’ve been around,” Detroit coach Jeff Blashill said this offseason. “When he goes up against the other team’s best players, he wants to win that battle to a level that the great ones have in terms of competitiveness.”

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It was already there in college, when Hyman recalled Larkin looking over at him in down-and-back skating races, trying to beat his senior mentor and linemate at a drill Hyman had always made his calling card. It already was there at the NTDP, too: Danton Cole, Larkin’s coach at the national program, made it all of 35 seconds into an interview about Larkin at that age before mentioning his compete level.

Whenever it first emerged, though, the roots of it trait trace back to his father, Kevin.

Kevin Larkin had grown up in Toronto before he and his brothers, Paul and Jimmy, each came to the U.S. on college soccer scholarships — Kevin to the University of Southern Indiana, Paul to Oakland University and Jimmy to Virginia Commonwealth.

The brothers were athletes used to competing, and that carried on to the next generation of Larkins, after Kevin and Paul moved near each other in metro Detroit and each had two boys, all similar in age.

That meant there was “always a game” going on, said Dylan’s mother, Denise Larkin. “Mini-sticks in the house in the winter, playing on the ponds, soccer.”

She remembered being at tournaments and how, if the team needed a goal, Dylan would throw “everything but the kitchen sink” at the net, until something went in. The competitive streak, she said, definitely did not come from her.

“But I think it is something that you’re kind of born with to be so competitive,” she said. “I’m sure, too, being a (younger) brother. His older brother would probably tease him and push him, probably literally and figuratively. Just always not wanting to be the one left behind, I think that’s where it comes from.”

Between that, and the athletic and competitive genes from the Larkin side of the family, it’s easy enough to see how Dylan Larkin, the competitor, came to be.

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But there’s never a guarantee that a competitive edge will go anywhere without the right molding. Those who’ve been around Larkin agree that Kevin and Denise gave him that at home. “They were two of the best parents that we ever had in the organization,” said Joe Smaza, the coach of the Belle Tire AAA program for Larkin’s age group.

On the ice, though, that guiding hand also came from Smaza, who Larkin last year called one of his most influential youth coaches. Their origin story was simple enough: Smaza had heard about a fast young player in the area playing exhibition hockey for HoneyBaked, and liked what he saw, prompting him to offer Larkin a spot on his team.

That team, as it happened, went on to become legendary, at least as AAA hockey teams go: Belle Tire won the 14U National Championship, and in addition to Larkin, his three Belle Tire AAA teams from 2009-12 featured future NHL first-round picks Kyle Connor, Zach Werenski and Brendan Perlini, plus five more players who went on to be drafted.

That sheer volume of players drafted from one program ran sharply counter to prevailing wisdom: that making the NHL was an extreme longshot.

“All you hear as a kid in hockey is how impossible it is to play in the NHL,” Smaza said. “And that wasn’t our message. It’s never been any of the messages that I’ve had on any of the teams that I’ve coached.

“It’s: ‘If it’s not you, then who?'”

Because of their overall talent level, and perhaps that mindset, Larkin’s teams could go toe-to-toe with other top teams and players in North America, whether it was the Chicago Mission, led by future first-rounders William Nylander and Nick Schmaltz, or the Toronto Marlboros, with Josh Ho-Sang and Connor McDavid.

“One thing with Dylan,” Kevin Larkin said, “he always wanted to play against the best, measure himself against the best players in his age group. … He loves playing against the best. He feels it brings the best out in him.”

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Under normal circumstances, Smaza recalled, his teams “very, very rarely” had captains. He and his staff didn’t like to differentiate any of the players from each other. But the ’96 birth year group was special in that way, too: Over their run together, with all that future NHL talent, Smaza said they had three captains: Damian Chrcek and Austin Kamer — two players who would go on to play at Michigan State — and Larkin.

“He was the kind of kid — and I really truly believe he still is, it was in his DNA that we didn’t have to motivate him,” Smaza said. “You knew what you were going to get out of him. … For Dylan, the guys knew it and they respected it.”

These are the kind of stories that sound prophetic in hindsight: The young center who went toe-to-toe with the continent’s best as a kid, only to grow up and do the same as a pro. The competitive streak rooted in genes and honed in the exact right environment. The early experience with leadership.

The reality check for that predestined narrative, though, might just come from Larkin’s mom, who thinks she was “probably one of the last ones to really think that it would go this far.”

Yes, she too felt like the family was in a “fairy tale” when Dylan was drafted to the hometown team. Denise Larkin was floored watching her 19-year-old suddenly playing on a line with Henrik Zetterberg. And admittedly, she did sense early on her son had something special, possibly as young as 5 or 6.

“But there’s a lot of special kids out there,” she said. “So you just don’t know which one is going to be that one that gets to where he’s at.”

If Larkin gets his competitiveness from his dad, then the other side of his makeup very likely comes from Denise. She says she’s tried to be the one who “softens the edges” and to remind him that no one can actually be perfect, no matter how hard they chase it. She saw early on how hard-driven her son was to improve, and while that certainly seems to serve him in many ways, it’s also only part of his personality. And only part of what it will now take for him to lead.

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Before Larkin was given the “C,” his teammate and fellow alternate captain Luke Glendening remarked that Larkin had “a great temperature of the room, in terms of, he knows when something needs to be said, when we need to call out something in terms of as a team, just not performing. But he also knows that there’s a time to lift guys up.” Weeks later, Bobby Ryan told the story of how, shortly after arriving in Detroit, he asked Larkin what was near the Arcadia Bluffs golf course, where he was planning a day trip alone. Larkin called back and said he and two others were coming with Ryan.

Those interpersonal dynamics of a team sport take much more than competitiveness or work ethic. They take a perceptiveness and sensitivity. As early as first grade, Denise remembers Dylan’s teachers pointing out that he had an aptitude for reading the emotions in a room.

“He’s kind of got a natural ability to read people, and he actually is very compassionate about it,” she said.

These are things that have always made her proud of her son, long before anyone knew his name. But asked to remember the time when the path to this point seemed possible, she points to Larkin’s second year with the NTDP, his final year of high school.

The first year with Team USA is notoriously tough for players. The U17s play a USHL schedule, filled with older, more experienced players, thereby forcing their development into gear. Larkin had done relatively well in that first season, finishing fifth on the team in scoring, but as Denise remembers, “we lost a lot of games.”

The second year, however, is when players are supposed to reap the benefits. And Larkin, she remembers, came out flying.

Coach Danton Cole recalls Larkin arriving for workouts in the summer of 2013, and getting a glimpse at the binder given to the player by the team’s strength coach.

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“There was pencil marks all over it,” Cole said.

He was struck by the commitment, notable for a coach of a program composed of the country’s elite. That’s why, when Cole thinks back on Larkin, looking for a moment to illustrate him, there’s not one game or one goal that comes to mind. His memory leads him to the weeks and months just before that explosive second season, when Larkin had 56 points in 60 games.

“It was that two months in there,” he said. “Where it was like, ‘Hey, this kid’s serious about this. This is going to happen. He’s already decided.’”

Larkin, as it turned out, did blossom in his final year with the national team, and then his star really took off in his one season at Michigan. After that, in spring 2015, he turned pro, playing in just six American Hockey League playoff games before getting promoted to the Red Wings’ roster that fall.

By any definition, he had made it, and then for good measure he was selected to the NHL All-Star game as a rookie, too. But what should have been clear, by then, was that getting to the NHL was not going to be enough for Larkin. And if his rookie season in 2015-16 felt like a dream, then his 2016-17 was a reality check. His scoring from Year 1 dropped off from 45 points to 32. He slipped from a plus-11 to a minus-28.

He had young-player habits that coach Jeff Blashill felt needed to change, and without the torrid scoring pace, they were harder to overlook. That, Blashill recalled, is when “the real hard conversations” started.

It’s hard to know how a player, especially one with such a meteoric rise, will handle those moments. Competitiveness alone doesn’t help someone improve.

“Constantly, you could always tell that he was reflecting on it after the conversations, and had an understanding that ultimately what I was trying to do was help him,” Blashill said. “And I think sometimes, players, when they get coached, they get their back up and then you can’t get helped. And ultimately I think even from those early days, Dylan, because of who he is, understood that, understood where I was coming from …  And I think that understanding, that ability then to look in the mirror and say there might be something here, and I gotta make adjustments, is what’s really allowed him to continue to grow into, I think, one of the better winners in this league in terms of how he plays hockey.”

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That accountability and willingness to adapt was an early sign of Larkin’s leadership ability. You can’t push and help others if you won’t be pushed or helped yourself.

He was learning how to do this on a team with Stanley Cup winners like Niklas Kronwall and Henrik Zetterberg, who Larkin called “the ultimate captain” because of his consistency and how he kept the pulse of the locker room.

“The guys respected him as great as I’ve seen anyone respected,” Larkin said.

Zetterberg had become an immediate fixture in Larkin’s Red Wings career, playing on a line together their first season. He had watched everything Zetterberg had done from his first day, and as time went on, Zetterberg would tell him things like just keep that fire in you going, or keep your engine running. Larkin looks back now at the former captain’s final seasons, and sees the ways Zetterberg “molded me and would give me lessons without me even knowing it, maybe.”

By the end, it had gotten to the point where Larkin was playing more than Zetterberg, and scoring more, too. But not being the center of attention didn’t seem to matter to the franchise legend. And seeing that made one final impression on Larkin.

“It never affected who he was and how he handled himself in the locker room, he never got upset about it, just went about his business and was happy for me,” Larkin said. “And that’s what a captain is: someone that (when) someone else gets the puck or the game-winning goal, and you’re just as happy for the team as it would be if you scored. Just having that, having him kind of mold me and push me to be a growing voice in the locker room, (happened) at the end of Henrik’s career.”

If you’re looking for the final, crucial moments that propelled Larkin to the captaincy, it’s hard not to point there. Larkin had already been gaining the locker room’s respect, Blashill and Glendening said, through his work ethic. But those final observations of Zetterberg, in the fleeting days of his mentor’s career, paved the way for him to quickly and obviously emerge as the next leader once Zetterberg and Kronwall retired.

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In hindsight, this outcome can look misleadingly inevitable, from virtually any point in Larkin’s story. It really does read like a fairy tale.

But none of it was ever actually predestined. It happened as much because of how Larkin was raised, the people who guided him, and his willingness to learn and grow — every bit as much as it happened because of his innate skills and traits.

Ironically, by the time Yzerman returned to the franchise as general manager in 2019, it was obvious, and perhaps even inevitable, Larkin would be the Red Wings’ captain. But Yzerman waited.

And even as the Red Wings’ season devolved into one of the most challenging in recent NHL memory, “I can’t say there was too many nights where I said, ‘you know what, Dylan didn’t bring it tonight,'” Yzerman said. “He brought it every day in practice and every night in the games. Those are the things that really stood out to me.”

In the end, he concluded what so many others already had: It was clear Larkin was the Red Wings’ captain.

Certainly, the moment it was announced last month felt like a culmination. But for someone as competitive as Larkin, getting a “C” stitched onto his jersey is far from an endgame. Less than two weeks before the announcement, talking about his desire to become a top two-way player, Larkin said he wants “to be known for team success.”

Right now, he is stepping into this role for a team stuck at the bottom of the NHL standings. His coach, Jeff Blashill, is in the final year of his contract, and the team’s next wave of players is only just beginning to arrive in the NHL. Larkin’s leadership, in ways big and small, is going to be tested constantly.

If he succeeds, though, then the captaincy won’t one day look like the destination of his fairy-tale journey. It will be just the beginning of a whole new stretch of road.

(Top photo: Dave Reginek / NHLI via Getty Images)

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