Towards the end of the 2011 NHL All-Star Game Fantasy Draft, Kessel looked over and flashed a toothy grin at Paul Stastny.

One of them was about to have their name called and make their way to the stage. The other would remain in their seat, languishing in infamy. Stastny was stoic, the only bit of emotion betrayed by the slight nervous tapping of his foot.

But Kessel was relaxed, chuckling to himself — and only himself — when Stastny was selected with the second-last pick of the draft, leaving Kessel as the All-Star player no one else wanted.

Before his name was finally announced, the television broadcast panned to Alexander Ovechkin — long off the board at third overall — snapping a photograph on his phone of Kessel, the soon-to-be-punchline sitting alone.

The joke didn’t last long though. Soon after donning his Team Lidstrom jersey as pick No. 36, Kessel was gifted $20,000 USD to donate to a charity of his choice and a brand-new hybrid Honda CR-Z.

“$20,000 to charity, that’s unbelievable,” Kessel told assembled media afterwards. “I’m real excited about that.” He noted how he planned to donate the money to a cancer charity, a cause closely connected to his own cancer diagnosis and subsequent recovery during his rookie NHL season.

And as for the car?

“I’ll drive it,” he said.

Kessel and the CR-Z are forever linked in this viral off-ice moment, but they’ve also since gone their separate ways.

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Rolling off the assembly line in 2010, the hybrid sports car was a spiritual successor to Honda’s cult-classic CR-X that promised to be much more environmentally friendly.

Honda’s new hatchback saw its US sales peak in 2011, the same year it was gifted to Kessel. But it was discontinued in 2016, when it made up less than 3,000 units out of Honda’s 1.4 million cars sold to Americans that year.

With hybrid sports cars much more popular now, Stephen Ottley, an award-winning journalist at Cars Guide, thinks the CR-Z “was just the right car at the wrong time.”

Though it won a prestigious JIDPO Good Design Award and was named Japan’s Car of the Year when first released, it had failed to gain enough traction with the car-buying public.

The distaste for Honda’s hybrid hatchback back then mirrored many people’s opinion of Kessel’s time in Toronto. If he had stayed with the Leafs, it’s possible Kessel would have remained a right player on the wrong team — a winner made to feel less so simply by association with a losing squad.

There was some good fortune that came out of Kessel being the last pick in 2011, but even more good fortune when he later landed on a Pittsburgh team that was crying out for a star winger to put them over the top.

Kessel’s winding path had found an optimal destination.

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Depending on who or where you ask, the name Phil Kessel may stand for different things: a punchline, a tragic hero, a missing piece, a Stanley Cup champion, a brother, a record-setter. These would all be correct; they would also be incomplete.

Because for one specific Honda CR-Z, Kessel was also an owner, a driver and an unwitting partner in a viral hockey moment.