via Pittsburgh Magazine

Pascal Dupuis is in Sidney Crosby’s bathroom, and he’s up to no good. The world’s greatest hockey player has stepped out of his hotel room for a few minutes, and it’s the perfect window for Dupuis to commence the delicate engineering of a booby trap. He lifts the heavy porcelain lid off the toilet, looks down into the tank and chuckles.

At this point in the story, you should be aware that Dupuis has four children, two dogs, a cat and a wife whom he chats with via Skype for hours when he’s on the road. He’s anchored to a cross necklace that he kisses four times before the puck drops, once for each child. The first two things he brings up when he’s asked why he took less money to stay in Pittsburgh are good neighbors and babysitters.

He is, for all intents and purposes, a wholesome All-American-French-Canadian dad. Which is precisely why you should never, ever leave your hotel room unattended to even the nicest of hockey players. At this moment, Dupuis is jangling nozzles, reattaching tubes and doing all sorts of nefarious reconfiguring to the throne of the NHL’s golden boy.

“Sometimes I mess with him simply to mess with him,” Dupuis explains. “Sid is pretty superstitious, to say the least. There are a couple things that are off-limits and a couple things you can have fun with.”

The lavatory, apparently, is the latter. Dupuis carefully replaces the lid and takes a step back to admire his masterpiece.

“You have to take the tube out of the tank and tilt it perfectly toward where the person stands,” Dupuis says. “Then you put the lid back on but make sure that the end of the tube is sticking out slightly so the person won’t notice.”

When Crosby returns, Dupuis is innocently talking to his wife on his laptop, as usual. After a while, Crosby enters the bathroom. The door clatters shut. Will he notice? Silence. Dupuis covers his mouth. Anticipation mounts.

Whoosh.

Pandemonium.

You can win a league MVP, a Stanley Cup and an Olympic Gold medal. You can be revered by millions upon millions of people. You can be the coolest, most laid-back guy in the world. But when you take a direct hit to the chest from a toilet squirt gun, you’re thrown into a state of discombobulated hysteria just like anyone else.

“The water just keeps shooting and shooting until the tank is full,” Dupuis laughs. “He couldn’t figure it out right away. He had no clue.”

After a few minutes of panic, the front desk receives a call from the distressed Captain.

More towels in Mr. Crosby’s room, please. A lot more.

Read the rest of the story here.