Right Place, Right Time

On September 15, 1987, Canada and the Soviet Union met for the third and final game of the Canada Cup finals—widely considered the greatest hockey game ever played.

The arena in Hamilton felt less like a rink and more like a pressure cooker. The Cold War loomed quietly in the background. The Soviets were at their peak. Canada had its legends on the ice. Every shift felt decisive. Every mistake felt permanent.

And somewhere in the middle of all that intensity, one of Canada’s players made a mistake.

A very human one.

He later admitted that during the game, he peed his pants.

Not because he was injured.
Not because there was no other option.
But because he forgot to go to the bathroom before the biggest game of his life—and once the puck dropped, his brain never circled back to that particular operational detail. Under that much speed and pressure, the body simply made a poor executive decision.

Hockey history is full of heroic moments. This one begins with a deeply unheroic lapse in planning.

That same player, however, would soon remind everyone why he was on the ice.

Late in the third period, with the score tied 5–5, he drifted behind the Soviet net. He wasn’t chasing the puck. He wasn’t forcing a play. He was waiting. As defenders collapsed toward the puck, he noticed something others didn’t—open ice forming where no one was standing yet.

Without looking, he slid the puck into that empty space.

A teammate arrived at precisely the right moment and scored the winning goal.

Canada erupted.

The player who forgot to use the bathroom before the most important game of his life was Wayne Gretzky.

That moment captured what made him different. He didn’t overpower opponents or rely on sheer speed. He anticipated. He seemed to process the game a few seconds ahead of everyone else. While others reacted, he predicted.

That ability wasn’t accidental. Gretzky was famously obsessive about preparation. He practiced relentlessly. He studied angles and patterns. He treated awareness as a skill that could be trained and refined. Teammates often said he worked harder mentally than anyone they’d ever played with.

But effort alone doesn’t fully explain outcomes that extreme.

There’s another, quieter part of the story that rarely gets discussed.

Gretzky was born on January 26.

In Canadian youth hockey, age-group cutoffs were based on the calendar year. A child born in January could be nearly a full year older than a teammate born in December, yet they’d be grouped together as the same age. At six or seven years old, that difference is enormous.

Older kids tend to be stronger, faster, and more coordinated. Coaches don’t consciously select based on age—they select based on performance. But early performance is often maturity wearing a disguise.

So those slightly older players receive more ice time, better coaching, and placement on elite teams. Confidence builds. Skills sharpen. Opportunities multiply. By the time physical differences even out years later, the structure is already in place.

This pattern has shown up repeatedly in Canadian hockey. Players born in the first few months of the year are dramatically overrepresented at elite levels—not because they’re inherently more talented, but because they were older at the exact moment opportunity first appeared.

This doesn’t diminish Gretzky’s greatness. Plenty of January-born kids never came close to the NHL. Talent, discipline, and obsession still mattered enormously.

But timing helped determine whose talent was nurtured long enough to compound.

That’s how luck usually works—not as magic or destiny, but as access. It decides who stays in the system. Who gets patience. Who’s allowed to develop through mistakes. And who quietly disappears before anyone knows what they might have become.

The same dynamic exists far beyond hockey.

Careers take off because someone enters an industry at the right moment. Businesses succeed because a product meets demand just as conditions shift. And in personal finance, outcomes are often mistaken for intelligence or discipline when timing played a far larger role than anyone wants to admit.

Two people can save diligently and make thoughtful decisions, yet experience very different results depending on when they started. One begins during a long stretch of favorable conditions and looks brilliant in hindsight. Another does the same things a few years later and feels perpetually behind. The difference isn’t effort. It’s calendar placement.

This is where people get into trouble—by drawing moral conclusions from noisy outcomes. We assume success proves wisdom and struggle proves poor decision-making. Then we try to copy visible winners without realizing how much of their result depended on conditions that can’t be repeated.

The more useful approach is quieter. Focus on choices that don’t require perfect timing to work. Leave room for bad luck. Avoid decisions that can end the game if circumstances turn against you. Build flexibility so opportunity has time to show up.

Because luck doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive wearing a name tag. It often looks like “good decisions” in hindsight and “bad decisions” in the moment.

Wayne Gretzky didn’t become Wayne Gretzky because he was born in January. Talent and effort mattered enormously. But being born at the right time may have helped ensure that his talent was noticed, developed, and allowed to compound.

In personal finance, the goal isn’t to eliminate luck—that’s impossible. It’s to respect its influence. To plan in a way that doesn’t require perfect markets, perfect timing, or perfect foresight to succeed.

Because you don’t need to get everything right.

You just need to stay in the game long enough for timing—good or bad—to even out.