Zdeno Chara has now said goodbye to hockey four separate times
Zdeno Chara took off his skates at centre ice in Trencin on Friday, set them down, and walked to the dressing room barefoot, holding his twin sons' hands while the other players raised their sticks. Organisers had billed the game, Zee's Final Shift, as "a definitive and natural end to his great career." Chara has now reached the end of his career four times. He ended it competitively in two stages. He played his last NHL game on 29 April 2022, for the New York Islanders, the team he had started with a quarter of a century earlier. He signed a one-day contract with Boston that September and formally announced his retirement, closing the books on 1,680 games, the most ever played by a defenceman. He was 45 by then, and had spent his final season back on Long Island where he began in 1997. Every farewell since has been ceremonial, and each has closed a part of the career the previous one left open.
The four endings
The second ending was institutional. Chara was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame on 10 November 2025, in his first year of eligibility, the first man called to the podium that night. He spoke for nine minutes, walking through each of his NHL stops. A player cannot be inducted until three years after retiring, so the wait is built in. The Hall then answers the question of whether a player was great enough, and the answer cannot be reopened. The IIHF has inducted Chara into its own Hall of Fame as well, and the organisers of Friday's game listed both on the event's official page. The two inductions deliver the same verdict from two bodies, and they count here as one ending. The third ending was the club's. Boston retired Chara's No. 33 on 15 January 2026, raising it to the rafters at TD Garden, and no Bruin will wear it again. Chara had captained the Bruins for all 14 of his seasons there and was the first captain to bring the Stanley Cup to Boston since 1972. Retiring a number is narrower than a Hall of Fame induction and more final. The Bruins have taken No. 33 out of circulation inside one building, permanently. Chara did not have to play for any of those three endings, and he played on Friday. He controlled only the fourth ending, and only that one put him back on the ice. He staged Zee's Final Shift himself, in his home town, at the Pavol Demitra Ice Stadium, with the proceeds going to Slovak schools. He had picked the building for that reason. "It will be in my home town, at the stadium where I first stepped on the ice," Chara told Sportnet before the game. "It will be a nice connection between the beginning and the end." The rink sold out. Team Boston beat Team World 13-8. Patrice Bergeron and Milan Lucic scored three each, and Chara and both his sons scored. In the second intermission he lined up a slapshot and hit 108.8 miles per hour, the exact figure that set the NHL record in 2012 and has never been beaten. The teams held a shootout after the final whistle, Chara taking attempts for both of them. Team World won it 3-2, Miroslav Satan scoring the decisive goal. He had said before the game that he no longer felt like a hockey player. "Definitely I feel a lot more comfortable now doing Ironmans than skating," Chara told NHL.com. "You get out of it and you stop skating regularly, you lose it, quite a bit of comfort." He put the gear back on anyway. The NHL, the Hall of Fame and the Bruins had staged the other three endings, and Chara built and scheduled this one himself.
Hossa's retirement game
Friday was not the first farewell of its kind at that rink. Marian Hossa held his own retirement game at the Pavol Demitra Ice Stadium in 2023, and Chara played in it. Hossa returned the favour three years later, suiting up for Team World at Chara's. Two Slovak Hall of Famers used the same ice in Trencin, three years apart, each hosting the other's send-off. The home-town farewell exhibition has become its own institution among this generation of Slovak players, separate from the endings the league stages. Hossa built the template and Chara followed it. Satan, Ziggy Palffy and Jaroslav Halak all skated on Friday, the same small group of Slovak players who have been marking each other's careers for thirty years. The NHL, the Hall of Fame and the Bruins had already closed their own versions, and Friday closed the playing. Chara's competitive career had stopped in 2022. He had gone on putting skates on in front of crowds, in alumni games and charity events, long after the standings stopped recording it, and he staged Friday deliberately as the last of them. He was asked afterwards whether he would go back. "I know where my limits are," he told Sportnet. "I cannot say that I would want to come back to hockey." Chara first stepped on the ice in that same building as a six-year-old, let in after hours by a family friend who worked the Zamboni, back when the town was still part of Communist Czechoslovakia. The stadium is named for Pavol Demitra, the Slovak forward killed in the 2011 Lokomotiv Yaroslavl plane crash. In the 38th minute the crowd chanted Demitra's name, as it has done for years. It then chanted the name of Chara's father, Zdenek, a Czechoslovak Olympic wrestler who took his son to his first training sessions, and the screen above the ice showed his photograph. Chara had tears in his eyes on the bench. His father died on 30 April 2026, four months before the game. The league marked the retirement, the Hall marked the greatness and the Bruins marked the number. None of the three ended the skating. Chara ended that himself, picking the date and the rink and the people in it, his sons on the ice with him and his father four months dead. "It is a big loss," he told Sportnet afterwards. "My father was a huge sports fan and an athlete, and he gave the sport an enormous amount of love. He badly wanted to be part of this game. So he watched it from heaven instead."
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