"Once you're in their hearts, you're there forever. And it goes both ways."

NHL goalie Gilles Villemure may be best remembered by New York Rangers fans for winning the 1971 Vezina Trophy in his first full season in the Big Apple, but it's worth remembering that he compiled his fair share of wins between the pipes of a Standardbred race bike, too.

Before riding a long and windy path through the minors to a seven-year, 219-game NHL career in the 1970s spent with the Rangers and the Chicago Black Hawks (then still styled as two words), Villemure had long caught the harness racing bug. The native of Trois-Rivières, Que., walked, groomed and trained Standardbreds through his school years, and began driving in races by 16.

During Villemure's time with the Rangers — which was recently chronicled at NHL.com in commemoration of the golden anniversary of his achieving goaltending's pinnacle — his involvement in harness racing blossomed at the New York City metropolitan area's three racetracks as well as on the Québec circuit, where he competed during the summer months.

"I did that in the summertime and played hockey in the wintertime. It was fun," Villemure said in a 2010 interview. "I raced all over the place — Montréal, Roosevelt, Yonkers, The Meadowlands. You need timing, you need quickness because when you live at the gate in harness racing, you have to time the gate, when you leave from behind the gate, if you have reflexes then you can get out of the gate quick. If you don't have the reflexes, then you lose a couple of steps and as a goaltender you need reflexes, of course. You have to make the right move at the right time."

After Villemure's netminding days concluded, he once again found his home at the racetrack, driving occasionally in New York and New Jersey before returning to his native Québec and concluding his driving career — through which he accumulated 28 wins — with a third-place finish in a $2,000 conditioned event at Hippodrome Trois-Rivières in August 1996.

In more recent years, Villemure, now 80 and living in Levittown, N.Y., has battled both cancer and COVID-19. Thankfully, as he had done countless times as the last line of defence on the ice, Villemure stood tall in the face of both — his cancer is in remission, and he came out of his bout with the novel coronavirus relatively unscathed.

"I was sick for a little while, but I feel better now," he said.