It was an early fall night in Hartford, the opening night of the 72nd National Hockey League season. For Joe Sakic, it was the kind of night of which dreams are made.

Sakic, Quebec's rookie center with the wicked wrist shot, dressed in the smallish visitors' dressing room deep inside Hartford Civic Center shortly before darting out for warm-ups with butterflies in his stomach.

He went back in the dressing room and waited, still nervous and tense, for what seemed like an eternity. The ice was cleaned and fans settled into their seats -- to unknowingly watch the birth of a Hall of Fame career.

Quick, hard, accurate and impossible to track -- Joe Sakic's unmatched wrist shot forced many a goalie to turn around and go fishing for the puck somewhere deep inside the net.

"Yeah, he was pretty sick," former NHL goalie Kevin Weekes said. "Just YouTube him and watch."

Sakic officially will be enshrined into the Hockey Hall of Fame on Nov. 12 largely because of his effective and, quite frankly, impossibly good wrist shot that helped him score 625 career regular-season goals and 84 in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Opponents were left in awe of it on most nights, almost as if they never saw it coming -- because a lot of times they didn't.

Joe Sakic vividly remembers attending his first NHL game at Pacific Coliseum and seeing the Vancouver Canucks play host to the Atlanta Flames. He was with his dad. He was four years old.

The score and the date are all long forgotten, but the memory of the event lives on in Sakic's mind because it was at that game that the young child from Burnaby, B.C., decided he wanted to be a hockey player.

"I don't think I remember anything else from age 10 down, but I do remember that," Sakic said. "I wanted to play that sport."

He played it like a Hall of Famer, which is exactly what Sakic will become later this year.

DENVER -- An ordinary Joe? Well, yes and no. Joe Sakic, elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame on Tuesday, was anything but an average hockey player during his 20-season career in the NHL, the first seven with the Quebec Nordiques and the final 13 with the Colorado Avalanche after the franchise moved to Denver in 1995.

The former star center's statistics speak for themselves, which is so appropriate because Sakic relished his reputation for saying so little about his own remarkable achievements over the years. Never a braggart or one to say anything controversial that might merit a mention on a sports talk show or nightly sportscast, he even joked with some pride about his "Quoteless Joe" reputation for giving bland responses in interviews, repeating the nickname himself with a smile and twinkle in his eye.

He was as approachable and friendly as any athlete, a guy who was willing to talk about almost any topic -- as long as it wasn't about himself.

Joe Sakic and Brendan Shanahan should be receiving phone calls sometime Tuesday afternoon from executives at the Hockey Hall of Fame. They won't be asking for memorabilia.

Sakic and Shanahan, who combined for 1,281 goals and five Stanley Cup rings all won between 1996-2002, are expected to headline the Hockey Hall of Fame Class of 2012, which will be announced in full Tuesday at 3 p.m. ET (live on NHL Network-U.S.). The induction ceremony will take place Nov. 12 at the historic building on the corner of Front and Yonge streets in Toronto.

Sakic and Shanahan were first-round picks in 1987 and retired after the 2008-09 season, so they have waited the required three years per the Hall's rules to be eligible for induction. Joining the two shoo-ins as first-time eligible candidates who could get a call from the Hall on Tuesday are Jeremy Roenick, Mats Sundin and Curtis Joseph.