When asked about the next record to fall to Brodeur, Lemaire said: "One hundred and four shutouts? I think it’ll never be broken. Never."

Which is what people used to say about Sawchuk’s 103 shutouts.

"That’s one record I never expected anybody to beat," Pronovost said, referring to his old roommate’s mark. "I’m glad it was Marty who did it."

— The New York Times

What's interesting about Martin Brodeur's latest record chase is that he hasn't exactly been passing contemporaries since the lockout. They're ghosts of hockey's past.

Sawchuk died two years before Brodeur was born. Hainsworth died 20 years before that. Mr. Goalie Glenn Hall is alive and well at 78, but Plante — the first man to wear a mask — passed on in 1986.

The only players from his era on the list are more than 20 shutouts behind (Patrick Roy is almost 40 back), something that's a credit to Brodeur's longevity as much as his brilliance. This season, he became the netminder who has played the most minutes in NHL history, but at 37, he's still elite, leading the league in wins so far and right up there in save percentage.

And, in something that doesn't get talked about enough, he has two more years to play on his current contract, the end of which he'll be 40 years old and likely way, way out in front in several of the key netminding categories.

Consider that, if he posts three 30-win seasons to cap things off, he'll be about 100 out in front of second-place Roy.

Gabe Desjardins has a good post this week comparing the feats of Sawchuk and Brodeur, looking at their eras and the number of shutouts when they played. Here's his conclusion:

Brodeur has outclassed the average NHL goaltender well into his 30s, while Sawchuk was basically at league-average by Age 26.  It's difficult to compare 1951-52, when half of the league's goalies played every minute of their team's games, to the modern era — with almost all of the NHL's six goalies in any given season now inducted into the Hall of Fame, it's possible that the average goaltender was simply better back then.  But with Europeans and Americans joining the game in large numbers in the 1990s, it's difficult to argue that the NHL wasn't proportionately better than it was 40 years earlier.  Brodeur's accomplishment — both overall, and in his peak years — absolutely eclipses Sawchuk's.

Something tells me we're going to talk about Brodeur's shutout number for a long, long time. Only, given he's got another 150-plus games to go, he's going to leave even the ghosts far, far behind.