Maple Leafs legend Mats Sundin looks back on his playing career in 'Home and Away'

Mats Sundin was in a familiar place. Everything was also very different.

It was February 2009. The former captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs was back in his second home, only this time as a member of the opposition.

Sundin had signed with the Vancouver Canucks after 13 seasons under the brightest of spotlights in hockey's biggest media market.

The Swedish centre jolted out of his hotel bed that cold Saturday morning. Sweat dripped down his brow. In his mind's eye, a scenario had just played out in the Leafs' dressing room. The crowd was roaring. His team needed him.

And Sundin's skate laces kept breaking.

"For a team captain, there's no worse feeling," he writes. "It's my perfect nightmare."

That scene opens Sundin's book Home and Away, which tracks a path that began with his parents and two brothers outside Stockholm and eventually led to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

He dives into the pressures and anxieties of being the first European selected No. 1 overall at the NHL draft, getting traded by the Quebec Nordiques to Toronto for franchise icon Wendel Clark, and the turbulent end to his time with the Leafs.

It's those campaigns with the Original Six club, including the last 11 as captain, that make up the bulk of Sundin's engaging prose alongside co-author Amy Stuart.

"The Maple Leafs' history is long and storied and complicated," he writes. "Leafs Nation is bigger than hockey. It's its own universe."

Sundin arrived in Toronto in 1994 after the trade for the hard-nosed Clark. Things didn't go according to plan early. There was a feeling in many hockey circles back then that teams with an abundance of European talent couldn't win.

"The first years were a shock," Sundin said in a phone interview from Stockholm. "Wendel Clark,