Bloodshed was averted that day, the eve of the Flyers' regular-season finale, at home against the Pens, though Shero said a loud round of jeers did move his son to observe, "Dad, these people are kind of crazy, aren't they?"

Shero said he told his son: "Yeah, these are Philly fans, buddy."

Then he said he explained that the jeers were in jest, that Chris could relax. No harm was going to befall a son and grandson of Fred Shero, in the battle-scarred heart of Flyers country, even if they arrived flying the black-and-gold flag of No. 87, currently those fans' most hated foe. After all, wasn't it Freddie himself who once said: "Win today, and your offspring can walk into a Delco bar many years later as the GM of a bitter rival and still be treated like royalty"? Or something like that.

Tonight at the Wachovia Center, Ray Shero's team will try to take an all-but-insurmountable 3-0 lead in its Eastern Conference final series against the underdog Flyers. Seated behind the Pens' bench will be a 58-year-old Flyers fan and former Ridley High coach, Jim Garvey, of Horsham, who will be pulling for Pittsburgh all the way.

Garvey once helped run Fred Shero's hockey camp and has known Ray Shero since the GM was a teenager. Garvey counts teaching Ray to drive a stick shift and setting up Ray's 1991 bachelor party in Atlantic City among his life's accomplishments. He was the force behind the beef-and-beer fundraiser for Ridley High hockey that Shero attended last month, and he was the guy who sold $3,000 worth of raffle tickets for that Crosby jersey, most of them presumably to Flyers fans.

There are many subtexts to this series - the Flyers' attempt to soldier on without Kimmo Timonen, the friendly rivalry between Crosby and Mike Richards, Derian Hatcher's history with Crosby, Evgeni Malkin's continuing emergence as a dominant player - but among the strangest is that the man running the Penguins has such deep, close ties to this area and to the Flyers. If Flyer Nation were an Ivy League college (OK, hard to imagine, yes), Ray Shero, who still has his ticket stub from the Stanley Cup-clinching game in 1974, would be a "legacy."

"Ray hasn't changed one iota, his entire life. Ray's one of these guys, he doesn't forget where he came from," Garvey said the other day. "He's kind of a blue-collar guy with a white-collar job."

Though he was born in Minnesota when his father was coaching in the minors there, Shero, 45, considers Cherry Hill his hometown. It's where his family settled a year after Freddie signed on to coach the Flyers, in 1971, until 1978, when he left to coach the Rangers, and where Freddie and his wife Mariette returned in retirement, before Fred Shero passed away after suffering from stomach cancer, in 1990.

Somebody asked Ray recently what he remembered from his time growing up here, age 9 through 16.

"I probably remember everything," Shero said. "It was a great time in my life. The Stanley Cups, the Soviet game. I remember so much about it. Our [Penguins] farm team in Wilkes-Barre, they play at the old Spectrum. I went down and [Flyers head equipment manager] Derek Settlemyre gave me a tour of the old locker room, it's now the Phantoms' room; it's changed around a little bit. I have lots of memories of that locker room when I was a kid, running around and hiding and stealing sticks . . . Rick MacLeish scored 50 goals [in 1973]. He would have scored more, but he was a lefty like me, and I stole all his sticks."

After the Flyers won their first Cup, at home against the Bruins, Shero remembers waiting outside the locker room with his brother, Jean-Paul, and Blake Allen, son of Flyers GM Keith Allen. When the fans finally left the Spectrum, he remembers workers matter-of-factly putting down the floor for lacrosse, oblivious to the history that had just been made.

All in all, being the son of the coach who brought the Flyers their only two Stanley Cups, in '74 and '75, was a pretty good gig. Kids of players and coaches were always welcome to skate after practice; rides home from Bobby Clarke, Gary Dornhoefer or Bernie Parent weren't uncommon. Sometimes he could take friends to games.

"He never wanted to come off the ice," said Terry Crisp, a Flyers player and then assistant coach under Fred Shero. Crisp now works as a broadcaster for the Nashville Predators, for whom Ray Shero was assistant GM from 1998 to 2006, when he took over the Pens. "Ray and our son Tony, they'd stay out until the Zamboni driver threatened to run over 'em. Ray was always a quiet, well-mannered person."

His father's image is that of the absent-minded professor, inscrutable, a bit of a mystic - "Freddie the Fog." That wasn't Fred Shero the father, Ray said.

"He was a normal dad. He really pushed school on me. He was really pushing baseball on me - he always felt that if you play hockey, you get hurt. My friends would come over and we'd play [with Fred] in the backyard, wiffle ball. We had a good time."

Orel Hershiser was a Little League teammate, Ray a third baseman. Fred Shero wasn't the kind of parent who heckled umpires, Ray recalled, or hockey refs, for that matter.

"He'd never sit in the stands, he'd be out beyond the outfield fence, he'd just be watching the game," Ray said. "I can't remember him ever giving me a hockey tip, do it this way or do it that way. He let me play, let me enjoy the game. If I had some questions, he'd answer 'em, but he was never pushy. I never had any pressure on me. He wanted to make sure I paid more attention in school than in the ice rink."

Ray played college hockey at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y. He vividly remembers the only time his father ever said anything to him about his play. Ray had taken a penalty while killing a penalty, putting his team down two men. The Saints survived and won.

"He didn't even say it to me, he said it to my coach," Ray recalled. "The coach, Mike McShane, [asked], 'What did you think of the game?' He said, 'Well, Mike, I've been around the game 40-some years, and I must say, that's probably the worst bleeping penalty I've ever seen in a hockey game.' "

Nonetheless, Fred took pride in his son's abilities. Ray was drafted by the Los Angeles Kings and went to camp with them in 1985, though he never played professionally. The Los Angeles Times wrote a story in which Fred likened Ray to his Flyers captain, Clarke.

"I fell short of that, obviously," Ray said. "I was a player that was probably a little short on skating. I had good hands, good sense for the game, was competitive."

He took those traits into a stint as an NHL agent, knowing the whole time he wanted to move into management. That chance arrived in 1993, when former St. Lawrence teammate Randy Sexton became the GM of the expansion Ottawa Senators and made Ray his 30-year-old assistant. In his lengthy apprenticeships in Ottawa and Nashville, Shero honed the kind of how-to-compete-on-a-budget sensibility that eventually made him attractive to the Penguins.

Broadcaster and Sports Illustrated columnist Pierre McGuire worked with Shero in Ottawa, when McGuire was a Senators scout and then assistant coach.

"You knew this was going to happen a long time ago, you knew that he was going to be very effective, because he gets it," McGuire said, when asked about Shero. "He gets the sport and he gets the people that are in the sport, very well."

Pittsburgh had amassed all of 58 points and had missed the playoffs 4 years in a row when Shero arrived. He had Crosby, Malkin, goalie Marc-Andre Fleury and some other significant pieces. He needed to add some grit and character, along the lines of Gary Roberts and Jarkko Ruutu, and he had to decide what to do with Michel Therrien, the coach he had inherited, whom Shero hardly knew at all. Therrien was a coach-of-the-year finalist in 2007 but weathered a 7-11 start this season before the team rocketed to second in the East.

"When everybody was crying out for him to fire the coach, he showed loyalty to the coach, and I think that resonated within the organization," McGuire said. "The organization realized there was one boss, and it was Ray Shero, and he was not going to be bullied into making any decisions, by anybody."

Shero's other big impact on the Pens was his trade-deadline deal this spring that brought Marian Hossa in to play alongside Crosby, at the cost of three players and the Pens' first-round draft choice this year. Hossa can be a free agent this offseason; it was a deal that said Pittsburgh was gambling on winning the 2008 Stanley Cup.

"It was something we'd kind of dipped our toe in the water on maybe a month earlier," Shero said. "The night before the deadline, I said to our staff at dinner, 'In my opinion, there's less than a 5 percent chance of this happening.' So we were working on some other things . . . all of a sudden, this came together, the last day . . . with the Eastern Conference pretty much wide open this year, a lot of decent teams, you try to give your team the best chance to win. You never know how it's going to work out when you do it."

So far, with Hossa scoring the series-clinching goal to get the Pens past the Rangers into the conference finals, it's working out just great. Two victories over the battered Flyers stand between Pittsburgh and its first finals appearance since it last won the Cup, in 1992.

Crisp was asked what he thought Fred Shero would make of Ray's success.

"He'd be as proud as punch, but you'd never hear him say it," Crisp offered. "He'd say, 'Well, yeah, I guess the kid did OK.' Freddie never elaborated too much in those instances. But he sure would be proud of him." *