Bill Blair, from his perch inside the Saddledome, is on full alert. As always.

Experienced in matters of emergency, he knows in a blink he can rush from his seat — front row of the upper bowl — and get through the concourse to a stairwell that will feed him straight down to the dressing-room area.

During the game, his eyes are trained on the ice. “If you see blood, you go.”

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On this night, he goes.

From behind the Calgary Flames’ bench, it’s a quick hop to the event-level tunnel, and from there it’s just a matter of steps to the medical room. This is the path Kelly Brett is taking now.

Brett, the Calgary Flames physician, and Blair, the team dentist, meet and congregate over their latest patient, a player whose face has been smashed out of shape by a goalie stick.

Craig Conroy, still wearing most of his gear, is lying on a table. His sweater and shoulder pads have been removed, his skates loosened.

It’s April 11, 2004, the middle of Game 3 of Calgary’s first-round matchup with the Vancouver Canucks, as they stare into Conroy’s mucked-up maw, the right side of which is mangled.

Distressed, the assistant captain nevertheless overhears their professional assessment.

“I remember Doc Blair saying, ‘Oh shit, he’s a mess,'” Conroy, laughing, said the other day. “Those were his exact words.”

Looking back, Blair — who, through decades of on-site sports dentistry has patched up countless amateurs and professionals — doesn’t soften his words from 16 years ago.

“It was one of the worst.”

It stands as a representative study of what NHL team dentists go through, checking a perfect storm of boxes — extensive damage, sweaty player, high stakes competition, ticking clock, impatient coach.

With wounds to address, Blair gets busy, oblivious to the external heat — from the drydocked player, and from his blunt boss, Darryl Sutter.

“You know Connie’s pretty excitable — he basically just wanted to get back out there and play,” said Brett. “And you’ve got somebody popping their head in to see if the player’s ready to go out again and you’re trying to put the guy’s face back together.

“Obviously, the coach at the time was very interested in him getting back out and playing. Which is also pressure, right? I remember the coach coming in and basically giving us the evil eye.”

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Blair, though, is a steady hand, someone’s who seen plenty. Even if this is something extreme.

Conroy, early in the second period, had been clubbed by goalie Johan Hedberg’s follow-through. (“He just swung it around like a baseball bat,” recalled Conroy, “and it hit me right in the face.”) He skated straight off, aware that the right side of his mouth was in tatters.

Blair sews up Conroy’s lip, sews up his gums, re-implants his teeth. Then he needs to create a splint to stabilize the teeth, to solidify the player’s broken jaw. This procedure requires him to run wire through the roof of Conroy’s mouth.

“And it’s thick wire. That hurt. That hurt a lot,” said Conroy. “Instantly I broke into a cold sweat. You could feel them pull it back into place.”

But, given the circumstances, Blair is doing a fantastic job. “That was good work by Bill,” Brett said. “An amazing amount of work done in such a short amount of time.”

Remarkably, by the start of the third period, the Flames’ top centreman — his mouth frozen, his face lopsided — is given the go-ahead.

“Darryl came in and said, ‘How are you doing?'” said Blair. “I said, ‘He’s ready to go.’ And he said, ‘What took you so fucking long?'”

Conroy remembers dragging himself off the table and looking around the tiny room.

“It looked like a bomb had gone off in there,” he said. “There was blood everywhere … because my lip kind of exploded.”

Even with the expertise of Blair and Brett, even with the hurry-up attitude of Sutter, the decision to return to action was all Conroy’s.

“You know what? I was hurt already. I wasn’t going to hurt it anymore,” he said. “They put it back together. After they did it, my whole mouth and face was sore. I don’t think I played very well the rest of that game, though.

“I definitely wasn’t feeling great. It’s hard to believe that you’d get hit in the face like that with a stick (and not have a concussion), but I can’t remember.”

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Conroy, who missed nearly all of the second period, still ended up taking 21 shifts in the 2-1 loss. But more impressive than his 15 minutes of ice time was what Blair and Brett accomplished in maybe 35 or 40 minutes.

“It’s unbelievable what they did — and they did it within whatever (time frame) a period would be,” said Conroy. “They did a great job. And it was quick.”

Which captures the behind-the-scenes vibe for an NHL team’s dental expert. More gory than glory.

It is a race. There is no dawdling.

And your patient could be anyone — one of the Flames, a visiting player, an official, even a coach. In your hands is a victim, suffering and likely bleeding and probably anxious.

“That stick is a weapon, right?” said Blair. “That puck is a weapon. And they can do a lot of damage. It’s basically trauma. That’s what dentistry is.”

Blair is asked about bedside manner versus rinkside manner.

A riled-up athlete, squirming mid-game, must present an entirely different set of challenges than the morning swish-and-spit clientele.

Right? Nope.

“It’s the same thing, whether it’s a 250-pound (player) or a 100-pound grandma sitting in the chair — you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” Blair said. “Hockey players, I have found, have a tremendous pain threshold. They know I’ve got to do something so they can get back out there.

“It may be just temporary enough to get them back out, but that’s what we have to do.”

When a rising shot or an errant stick finds a yap, there’s a psychological component to it as well, according to Brett. “Lacerations heal. A cut is one thing, but when you lose your teeth, you’ve lost them.”

Blair, personally, would not know — despite growing up as a goaltender in Eastend, Sask., and playing without a mask.

Chiclets in place, he graduated from the University of Alberta’s dental school and worked for 50 years, a career that included a private practice in Calgary and hundreds of football and hockey games.

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Blair’s track record on the sporting scene is lengthy, starting in the CFL with the 1969 Calgary Stampeders. A couple of years later, he founded a mouth-guard program for local high-school sports.

He did some WHA Cowboys, some WHL Wranglers. Then, in 1985, he began working with the Flames, a role that included camp medicals and exit interviews, regular-season home dates, every game in the playoffs, and, in 1989, being fitted for a Stanley Cup ring.

Blair notes that “you couldn’t live on” what a team dentist is paid. No matter — his bank of memories fairly brims with tales, such as the night one of the visitors was being assessed for a concussion.

After introducing themselves — Blair and Brett often worked as a tandem, each serving as the other’s assistant — the doctors asked the player his name.

“He says, ‘Tuesday,'” Blair said, snorting.

Pause for punchline. “And it wasn’t Tuesday, either.”

Over the years, Blair encountered — and tended to — plenty of gruesome injuries. Asked if, upon seeing especially horrific damage, he ever felt like throwing up his hands, he cackles. “Hey, that’s what I’m getting paid for.”

So if Conroy’s unsettling scene had been merely one of the worst, what tops the list?

No hesitation. Once, a defenceman took a slapper in the face with such force that it “knocked his whole maxilla loose.”

The maxilla is the upper jaw in its entirety. And, in this case, it had sheered and shifted significantly. The midline of the player’s teeth — and all of the bone holding them in place — was cranked from the typical 6 o’clock position to 4 o’clock.

“That’s how severe it was.”

No surprise, the poor chap did not return to action, instead heading straight to the hospital.

But, most of the time, team dentists can take care of business — at least the preliminary business — right at the rink.

Last spring, in Game 5 of the opening round, Flames centre Derek Ryan got tangled up with Carl Soderberg of the Colorado Avalanche. As they were falling, Soderberg’s skate came up and plunked Ryan in the mouth.

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“I knew right away — the tooth was facing this way,” said Ryan, pointing his index finger straight out, 90 degrees, from his face. “So I ran off the ice and they took me into the other room with the dentist and put me in the chair. It was totally messed up, so they yanked it out and I finished the game.”

Because the tooth came out with a “bunch of bone,” according to Ryan, he required a subsequent bone graft and the insertion of an implant screw, a procedure that took place the following day (since the Flames were eliminated).

But right then, at that moment, his in-game intent had been singleminded.

“You’re like, ‘Yeah, just do whatever. Obviously my tooth’s messed up, so it’s probably going to have to come out. Just numb it up, rip it out,'” Ryan said. “Because when you’re an athlete and you’re in a game, you’re just focused on that. You’re not really thinking about other things.

“Then, when the game’s over, you settle down a little bit and you’re, like, ‘Ah, man. My front tooth is gone.'”

While it’s central to hockey culture — shaking off terrific boo-boos and returning to action — the ability to withstand intense repair work varies from player to player.

“It so depends on their personality,” Brett said. “You’ve got your super-introspective guys. And you’ve got guys that just don’t seem to care about pain — they don’t have any pain receptors. There’s a huge difference in how people tolerate pain.

“Connie would be a guy to do anything to be able to go out and play — he’s that guy. Other guys would have called it it a day.

“What players are willing to put up with — and the pain that they can play through — is astonishing.”

Brett recalls seeing a forward felled by a slapshot to the thigh, the impact causing his leg to “stop working.” So they carted the player to the dressing room. He laid there, in the entranceway. After five minutes, he could move his leg a bit. Eventually a little more.

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“Then he hopped up and went back out,” said Brett. “I remember thinking, ‘I’d be crying, let alone going back out there.’ Stuff like that, over and over again, you see and it’s, ‘Geez, these guys are tough.'”

As the story goes, Edmonton Oilers blueliner Lee Fogolin, late one night in his Hartford hotel room, had been experiencing a terrible toothache. His solution? Removing it himself, using a coat hanger he bent specifically for the extraction.

Denis Gauthier, at the tail end of the 2000-01 season, tripped in practice and landed face-first on Jeff Shantz’s skate, shattering a bunch of teeth. His summer included seven root canals — and a grand total of 30 hours in the dentist’s chair.

“Anything around the mouth is sensitive,” said Mark Giordano. “That initial impact is painful. But it’s worse when you have to go to the dentist and get needles and drills and all that.”

He laughs. Sort of. Because he knows.

Giordano, as a rookie in AHL Lowell, lost three upper teeth in practice one morning. Last season here, his lower row was bashed in by a deflection.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” he said. “But my teeth started to get sore a couple days later. I went to the dentist and there was a crack across the bottom of my jaw. They had to take four of them out, all the roots were cracked. So they’ve put in a temporary bridge. And I have implants in there for when I’m done.”

Complications are common.

Once, a player left the ice because his front teeth were knocked out — and missing. No surprise, that. They’re white, they’re on the ice, they’re probably inside the Zamboni. But a dentist needs to know if there are roots still in place, so the player was X-rayed. And what do you know? The two teeth were still there — only they’d been rammed straight up by impact.

No problem for Blair. “I put my finger in his nose and pushed them back down, re-positioned them, put a splint in, and away he went.”

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Working a junior game, Brett remembers someone taking a puck in the teeth, then screaming at him because the mouthguard hadn’t saved his smile.

“He yelled at me, ‘Why am I wearing this stupid mouthguard?'” said Brett. “I replied, ‘So we know where your teeth are.’ And that’s basically what happened. His teeth were in his mouthguard. He lost two or three — that time.”

Then there was the night last winter when eight of James Neal’s shattered ivories got sprinkled all over the Rogers Arena ice after a high stick.

“Nealer’s, they were all fake, right?” said Giordano. “That was a bridge and if one comes out, they’re all coming out — and they all came out. But, yeah, it was kind of gross, to be honest.”

Blair, now 74, retired as “a wet-fingered dentist” this past May. He hasn’t done a Flames game for three years. The dental torch has been passed to Dr. Kristin Yont.

He still watches the team. “The pressure’s off of me, though. I can sit and have a beer.”

Which reminds him of something else. He doesn’t like the way Matthew Tkachuk wears his mouthguard, just letting it hang there. That makes it so easy to inhale.

He was at Stu Peppard Arena one day when a junior’s mouthguard jarred loose and he swallowed it.

“I couldn’t get it with my fingers,” recalled Blair, “but the maintenance man had a pair of needlenose pliers …”

(Top photo: Brett Holmes/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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