Even Petr Klima sometimes has trouble believing it has been more than three decades since he tiptoed out of a hotel in Nussdorf, West Germany, that housed the Czechoslovakian national team. It was on that night in 1985 that he met a pair of Detroit Red Wings employees in a darkened parking lot and defected to start a new life in the NHL.
That act of international espionage preceded 13 NHL seasons with the Red Wings, Edmonton Oilers, Tampa Bay Lightning, Los Angeles Kings and Pittsburgh Penguins that saw equal parts triumph and disappointment, punctuated by a Stanley Cup championship in 1990.
"Wow, I'm getting old," Klima said with a laugh.
All of it -- good and bad -- seems more relevant than ever as his 19-year-old twin sons, Kelly and Kevin, are looking to embark on their own pro hockey careers. Petr Klima just hopes they can avoid the mistakes he made.
"You've got to be strong," Klima said. "If you have goals in your life, sometimes the goals are taking longer than you expected. Sometimes you're on the top right away. Sometimes you're not. You have to be patient, you have to work hard. You have to stay on course and see what happens."
While Petr Klima went from starring in Czechoslovakia to the NHL by age 20, the twins' hockey path has been more circuitous. After playing for the London Knights of the Ontario Hockey League in 2014-15, the pair resurfaced last season with the Moncton Wildcats, who advanced to the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League final before losing to Rouyn-Noranda.
Both brothers dealt with injuries last season, including a fractured spine that kept Kevin off the ice for two months, and the Klima twins don't expect to make waves at the 2016 draft; Kevin is ranked 210th among North American skaters by NHL Central Scouting, and Kelly isn't ranked. For now, their best chance to earn the attention of NHL scouts may be to return to Moncton for one more year. After that, they'd like to continue playing on the same team, something they've done since they started organized hockey in Detroit at age 6.
Wherever they end up, they'll have an experienced NHL talent guiding them.
"He had a lot of experience in the NHL," Kelly said of his father. "He knew what we were doing. I think he's just trying to give us the message to avoid the mistakes he made so that we have the least amount of mistakes as possible. He's just trying to push us in the right direction."
Petr Klima's NHL career had plenty of highlights: starting his career with three consecutive 30-goal seasons; scoring the triple-overtime winner in Game 1 of the 1990 Stanley Cup finals; his career-high 40 goals the following season. But conversations about Klima's NHL career inevitably turn to the mistakes he made.
The partying, the arrests, the suspensions, the off-ice struggles that almost derailed a promising career. By the time Detroit traded the speedy wing to Edmonton in 1989, the organization and most of its fans had wiped their hands of Klima.
Klima takes responsibility for these mistakes, but a long look at the circumstances that brought him to North America adds much-needed context. One of roughly a dozen Europeans in the NHL when he arrived, Klima's defection wasn't quickly forgotten back home, where the Communist government painted him as a traitor and took swift action against his family.
"My dad lost his job, my mom lost her job," Klima said. "How do you deal with that? How are you going to play? The beginning was really tough. The hardest part was the language. When you come and you have to play and the season started right away ... The game was different. I learned the language but it took time. It didn't happen overnight."
With communist regimes collapsing in Eastern Europe, the Czechoslovak government was peacefully deposed in 1989's Velvet Revolution. In 1993, the country was split into the sovereign nations of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. By the time his twins were born in June 1997, the world Petr had navigated to come to the NHL was completely changed.
For all the enmity Klima felt toward Czechoslovakia's government, he never lost his love for his country, which he handed down to the twins. Petr finished his pro career playing in the Czech town of Litvinov while raising Kelly and Kevin in the Czech Republic. The family relocated to Detroit when the twins were 6 and they still spend one month each summer in the Czech Republic, where the twins train and enjoy time with family.
Klima didn't return to Michigan to wax nostalgic. He dedicated himself to molding his boys into hockey players. He quickly established the PK Euro club, which eventually grew to include eight different clubs, all coached by Klima. One year, 17 Czech teenagers moved into Klima's home to join a traveling team featuring the twins and coached by Petr.
"That was when we were 15," Kevin said. "We had a bunch of Czech players living in our house. It was fun. Czech was our first language, so we speak both Czech and English."
His path to the NHL wasn't easy, but Petr believes his sons might have it even tougher. Whereas father immediately signed a lengthy pro contract, Kelly and Kevin will have to work considerably harder to register on the NHL radar. Throw in their difficult season in London and their parents' divorce in 2013 and the Klima twins have had to overcome their own obstacles.
"We're both trying to make it in pro hockey," Kelly said. "But I don't know if anything is going to happen at the draft. We'll see. Hopefully something does."
If it does, their dad will be with them, ready to impart the difficult lessons he learned.
"It's very simple. You take your own path. If you want to go in the wrong direction, it's up to you," said Petr. "If you make the wrong decision then your hockey life can be over. As a parent, I give them some of my background, what I went through when I got here. Every step I did, wrong or right. Learn from that and live your life."