It was one of the most important nights of his life.

And he wasn't even there for it.

On February 22, 1980, a chilly, late-winter Friday, two scenes played out 800 miles apart that had an everlasting impact on Golden Knights general manager George McPhee.

The first was a college hockey game in Marquette, Mich., where McPhee was a sophomore scoring star for the Bowling Green Falcons in an otherwise forgettable game against Northern Michigan University.

His team won 7-5, for whatever it's worth.

The other was a game - the game of all games - at the 1980 Olympics featuring the United States and the Soviet Union.

Building a hockey team from scratch is no easy task.

After all, there's a reason that no first-year NHL franchise has qualified for the playoffs since 1980.

This is because gathering players where you used to have none, assembling a staff and meshing everything together is hard work. Especially when pitted against opponents that have decades of infrastructure, who are years into carefully laid out plans for success, it can be downright difficult to even have a respectable record in a team's formative years.

But while the on-ice product often receives more attention for expansion franchises, it's an equally challenging process to put together a business staff from scratch.

Which although it doesn't always have as much pizzazz as on-ice activity, is equally important to a team's long-term success.

It's been an ever-evolving storyline throughout the winter.

Who will be the first head coach of the Vegas Golden Knights?

Rumors have persisted, names have been bandied about. And as the NHL season has worn on and other teams have made coaching changes, the plot has certainly thickened.

In a Wednesday interview with SiriusXM NHL Network, Golden Knights general manager George McPhee shared some insight into what qualities he will be looking for in the team's first head coach.

"We met several months ago on this," McPhee said. "We talked about what we were looking for in a coach. The personality traits and the experience and everything else and decided that there would be a short list that we could put together. That we'd want someone who'd be the right fit for the Vegas Golden Knights, short term and long term. And that we would prefer to have an experienced coach.

"If it took us to the spring to exhaust that process, we would."

What the heck does Cirque du Soleil have in common with hockey?

As we found out this week, one thing these two seemingly opposite disciplines have in common is Jay Mellette, who was hired by the Golden Knights as the team's director of sports performance and head athletic trainer.

What we find out today is how Mellette's hire fits into Golden Knights general manager George McPhee's larger plan.

"He's going to be a big part of the build out of our staff," McPhee said of Mellette. "We wanted someone who was familiar with the talent in Las Vegas in medicine and sports performance. He's looked after 500 athletes here in this marketplace and used a lot of different people. He's well-versed in the process and knows the top people in the marketplace to send our athletes to or to hire.

"Now that Jay's on board, we're starting to build out our medical team and sports performance department. I think, going forward, we're in pretty good shape."

As McPhee detailed further, Mellette's hiring fits two other purposes that are part of the team's bigger picture.

There's a saying about icebergs.

The way it goes is that what you see on the surface only equates for 10 percent of the iceberg. The remaining 90 percent lies buried beneath the ocean, out of sight, out of mind. This often results in observers underestimating the size of what the iceberg is.

Throughout the 2016-17 season, the Vegas Golden Knights are kind of like an iceberg.

There's been a lot of headlines about the city's first major league pro sports franchise. They have ranged from it receiving its name and logo, the opening of T-Mobile Arena and the hiring of George McPhee as general manager.

But, like an iceberg, this visible portion of what the Golden Knights have been up to is only a fraction of the many items that have to be checked off before Opening Night this fall.

On the business side, team president Kerry Bubolz is leading the charge.

It's almost like getting to know your new neighbors.

Except in this case, your neighbors are the first residents in the history of your city to be launching a major league, professional sports franchise.

This was the case for Fox 5's Sean McAllister on January 9, when he had Golden Knights general manager George McPhee in studio as a guest.

Among the topics that McAllister and McPhee discussed was the prospect of Vegas' reputation amongst NHL players who may eventually call the city home. Or in keeping with the whole neighbors theme, the Fox crew's potential future neighbors.

It was an eventful holiday season for the Golden Knights' hockey operations staff the past few weeks.

With seven members of the staff, including general manager George McPhee, having been dispersed between Montreal and Toronto to scout the World Junior Championships, it was a milestone for a staff attending a large hockey event together for the first time.

This occurred while the staff has continued putting the final touches on an AHL affiliation agreement, while conducting final interviews for medical staff positions.

As recently as mid-December, McPhee said that he hoped to make final decisions on both just after the New Year.

"We are negotiating with a couple of groups, with respect to the American League," McPhee said. "We'll see where that goes, especially in the next few weeks.

Vegas is a city known for its New Year's celebrations.

Despite it being the Golden Knights' first year in town, the team's hockey operations department won't be celebrating.

With the World Juniors underway in Toronto and Montreal, seven members of the Golden Knights' hockey operations staff are in attendance. In a year where the organization will have to entirely stock its depth chart at the NHL, minor league and prospect levels, this year's tournament is especially important to the team.

2016 was a big year for Bill Foley.

Bringing the first-ever major league professional sports franchise to the city of Las Vegas, Foley's accomplishments the past 12 months were historic not only for his new hometown, but also for the NHL as a league.

Foley was recently chosen by NHL.com as one of hockey's most influential figures for the calendar year 2016.

What's it like to build an NHL team from scratch?

Current Golden Knights general manager George McPhee is the only NHL executive to have been given this opportunity since 2000.

Or looking at it from another perspective, McPhee is the only GM in history tasked with managing this sort of process in a salary cap era (2005-present). 

McPhee began this process last July, when he was hired as the first GM in Vegas history. Since then, he's hired and deployed a hockey ops staff, relocated to Las Vegas and began shaping the on-ice identity of a franchise that will play its first regular-season game in October 2017.