When you score the golden goal and win the Olympic gold medal in overtime, you’d think you’d be happily carried from party to party until they poured you on the plane.

But there’s no weeklong party, no parade, no time for teammates to carry on with each other. It’s over when they walk out of the dressing-room and scatter around the league to resume their regular-season schedules.

Which is what Sidney Crosby is doing in Edmonton Monday. This, for the next two days, is the party they missed. This, at Commonwealth Stadium.

Where the Edmonton Oilers celebrated their last Stanley Cup 20 years ago, is where Sidney Crosby’s Team Canada will have their parade  the first parade for a Canadian Olympic hockey gold-medal-winning team since they let all the kids out of school and paraded the Edmonton Mercurys down Jasper Avenue in 1952.

And having thousands of just-out-of-school Edmonton-area kids who will have the memory of seeing Crosby in that parade at the Canada Celebrates event Monday is reason enough to have added the Commonwealth Stadium component to what started out to be a closed-to-the-public dinner and golf tournament.

For Crosby, having the whole gathering is worthwhile just to have the chance to celebrate the Olympic gold that he really didn’t have after he won it that night in Vancouver. When you score the overtime winner in the Olympic hockey gold medal game, you know you’re going to be the last guy in the dressing- room by the time you’ve been interviewed by every rights-holding TV and radio network and finished with your long winding tour through the media mixed zone.

“When I got to the dressing room, I sat there for a long time,” said Crosby, in a telephone interview with QMI Agency Sunday morning before heading here.

“I just stayed sitting there, just hanging out enjoying it a bit. Then everyone just sort of scattered. It was just me and Shae Webber.”

Separate ways

One by one they left, many to enjoy a few hours with their families before the quick turn-around to resume the NHL season.

Crosby and Webber went back to the Olympic village and celebrated with the Edmonton curlers.

“I just ran into them at the village,” he said of Kevin Martin’s front end teammates, Marc Kennedy, Ben Hebert and fifth man Adam Enright.

“They played right through the Olympics, too,” he said of the curling ending on the final weekend as well. “I spent some time with them hanging out in the village. It was fun.”

The three curlers were in the Red Barn social area when Crosby and Webber showed up and sat down to join them.

“It was a no booze village,” said Kennedy. “We just wanted to spend our last day at the Olympics with other athletes.

“As the night was dwindling down to an end, Sidney headed off to bed. That’s when we remembered that we had a bottle of champagne in case we won the thing. We knew where Sidney’s room was because he moved in to it when we moved out to stay in a house near the curling venue when the competition began. We invited him to come have some of our champagne with us.

“We didn’t expect him to be as down to earth as he was. He told some hockey stories. We told some curling stories. We even had him showing us his curling delivery.

“It seems so surreal looking back. That afternoon Gordon Campbell, the premier of B.C. had given us seats six rows back right behind the American net where we watched Sidney score that goal. And a few hours later he was in our room showing us his curling delivery.”

It was the kind of goal that could change a player’s life, if the player’s name wasn’t Sidney Crosby.

“I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel anything has changed a lot,” said Crosby.

Paul Henderson’s sweater, worn when he scored the goal in 1972 against the Russians, just sold for $1 million. “I still have it,” said Crosby of his. “I think his goal was bigger than mine. I don’t put them at the same level.”

He laughed and said it probably added a few words to the coaches telling the kids “just put it on net, Sidney Crosby did.” Crosby can’t wait to get back together with his team and even some of the members of the women’s team. “We had some good doubles ping pong games in the village with them,” he said of his partner Meaghan Mikkelson, the St. Albert defenceman.

“I don’t know a lot about what’s going to be involved,” Crosby said of the Commonwealth Stadium tribute. “But I’ve heard they’ve invited some of the other Olympians, too, and I think that’s great. “It’s just going to be great to just be together and celebrate everything together.”