Only the greatest hockey player that ever lived could unravel a 13-year-old mystery for my family.

When my grandfather, Bill Kirbyson, passed away in the spring of 1995, my parents, Ron and Dawn, and my sister, Jill, were charged with cleaning up Grandpa’s house in Winnipeg and preparing it for sale. (I was going to school at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont., at the time and wasn’t able to help out.)

Many of the items in the house, such as jewellery, silverware, furniture and pictures, were itemized in his will and doled out to family members accordingly. But one item — a never used, left-handed, wooden Titan hockey stick — took the cleanup crew by surprise. I was the only hockey player in the family, but I shoot right-handed. Before the stick was put in the give-away pile, my dad noticed a signature on the blade. There was no mistaking it was by the Great One himself, with “99” written alongside it.

But where did it come from? Grandpa, by all accounts, was a Winnipeg Jets fan and not a collector of sports memorabilia. We would have known if he’d met Gretzky somewhere, wouldn’t we? None of us could imagine him staking out a mid-’80s Oilers practice along with a bunch of 11-year-old autograph hounds.

So, the stick has collected dust in my basement ever since. (Nobody seemed to notice when I made the executive decision to award it to myself.)

With the Gretzky-coached Phoenix Coyotes coming to town for an exhibition game last month, I decided to try to solve our family’s mystery. After all, the stick had once been in his hands for a few moments. (Maybe his fingerprints were still on it?) After a few phone calls to the Coyotes’ PR people, I was told Gretzky would talk to me after the game.

Accompanied by my seven-year-old son, Alex, I waited anxiously for the Great One’s press conference to finish. As we were ushered in, No. 99 stepped forward, shook our hands and said, “Hi, I’m Wayne Gretzky.”

As I started telling the story, Gretzky carefully took the stick from me and handled it like it was made of glass. He looked it over from head to toe, pausing to look at his signature.

“It’s not a game stick,” he said. “It must have been a promotion Titan did. Maybe your grandpa got it through a contest.” Upon further examination, he concluded Grandpa had won it between 1982 and 1985.

Feeling a bit guilty, I said I realized he must have signed a million sticks. “Not of these,” he interrupted. “There would have been a limited number. I’m guessing 99 of them.”

I wrote about Alex’s and my experience in the Winnipeg Free Press and was deluged with e-mails from people with further clues to how my grandpa had gotten the stick. The most popular was that Gretzky signed a bunch of sticks for Gainer’s Meats, a company owned at the time by Peter Pocklington, who also owned the Oilers. Some of the sticks made their way to Manitoba to be given away to customers in draws.

My mom told me my grandpa was always entering contests. So, we considered our mystery solved.

Nearing the end of our conversation, Gretzky turned to Alex and said, “You have some heavy eyes there, bud. You got school tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Alex replied with a shy grin.

“Let’s take a picture,” Gretzky suggested, pulling Alex over.

After a couple of snaps, Gretzky handed the stick back to me.

“They should go back to wood sticks,” he said. “The new sticks are crap.” IE