History should record that the Carolina Hurricanes were also extremely high on Zach Parise going into that epochal 2003 draft, one of the two or three best in the entire history of the NHL. If they didn’t have the second pick — after a season in which they finished dead last, they lost the lottery, too — they might have been OK anyway.

But it was a fait accompli that the Hurricanes would take Eric Staal. They used their first-round pick on a goalie the year before — some kid named Cam Ward, whatever happened to him, anyway? — so Marc-Andre Fleury wasn’t of interest, and they liked Staal better than Nathan Horton. The Pittsburgh Penguins traded up from third to first to take Fleury and that was that.

“We wanted to take a center and as it turned out we were able to get Eric with the second pick,” then-Hurricanes general manager Jim Rutherford told the News & Observer on Tuesday. “He was a young guy that had offensive ability, but we also knew he had great character and leadership qualities. We needed a number of things at that point in time. To get as much in a package with one player like Eric, that was a big step forward for us.”

That night in Nashville, Staal was instantly anointed as the savior of a franchise that had been three wins from the Stanley Cup only to plummet all the way to the sub-basement. On this Tuesday, 21 years and a month later, as he hangs up his skates and his jersey is prepared for the rafters, even with all the ups and downs along the way, it’s impossible to argue that he wasn’t.

His origin story had already made him famous: The oldest of four NHL-bound brothers with their own outdoor rink on the family sod farm in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Before he laced up a skate in Raleigh, he faced incredible expectations on and off the ice, to be the new face of a franchise that would see Ron Francis depart in the middle of Staal’s rookie season, one in which he went straight into the NHL.

At one point late that season, he spent an hour in a room under the arena signing 2,000 pucks for the team to give away to season-ticket holders; he was featured in a GQ photo shoot wearing a fedora with a cake on his lap, for some reason. That first year, the team missed the playoffs and swapped out Paul Maurice for Peter Laviolette behind the bench, then the NHL skipped the next season entirely. Staal returned to Raleigh in the fall of 2005 bigger. Stronger. Ready.

That ended up bring the only 100-point season of his career, part of a group of upstarts that figured out the NHL’s new rules and surprised everyone but themselves. That spring, as an 21-year-old, he led the playoffs in points and assists, the offensive fulcrum of a Cup championship team that wasn’t long on bona fide stars. It took him less than three years to deliver on the promise of his draft night.

He was the offensive star of the 2009 team that recaptured some of that magic — scoring that goal on Martin Brodeur during the Shock at the Rock — and his star power was one reason the 2011 All-Star Game at PNC Arena was such a rousing success. If the Hurricanes had made the playoffs that season, and they absolutely should have, Staal’s legacy might be dramatically different.

But he was the captain as things fell apart, for the first six years of the dismal decade. As things changed around him — even the arrival of his younger brother Jordan couldn’t arrest the slide, at least not until Eric was gone — he bore that annual failure like a weighted vest. Fingers were inevitably pointed his way, and maybe there was more he could have done, but in retrospect there are certainly more salient factors: the coaching of Kirk Muller and Bill Peters, Peter Karmanos’ empty pockets.

When Francis took over for Rutherford as GM, he held onto Staal until his contract was expiring, shuffling him off to the New York Rangers for a pittance in 2016. Staal’s career took him to Minnesota and Montreal and Buffalo and finally Florida, where he helped eliminate the Hurricanes in the playoffs in 2023, a bit player on the Panthers in what turned out to be his last season.

A year later, he was back at PNC Arena watching the Hurricanes in the postseason: Once the kid everyone watched, now he watched with his kids. He settled his family outside Minneapolis, not too far from where he grew up, but there’s a part of him that will always be here.

He’s too important to what the Hurricanes became. His story remains essential to what they are now.