I first saw the photo when I was about 10, which would be 10 years after it was taken. It grabbed me, held on and has never let go. Rosebud.

I saw it in a book about the NHL. At 10, we began to realize there were sports to play, and watch, and listen to, and read about other than baseball. Basketball, football, even golf - Arnie vs. Jack was on the boil in 1962 - began to make seasonal impressions. It never took much, anyway.

But this photo, oh man . . .

Is it possible that this photo, first viewed at such an impressionable age, was so powerful that it helped shape and sustain my point-of-view? Forgive such supernatural self-indulgence, but might I have been so smitten by it that a piece of it can be found in every column I've written?

Ya never know.

The photo's subjects are Henry, then with the Bruins, and Canadiens great Maurice "Rocket" Richard. They're seen shaking hands after Montreal eliminated Boston from the first round - the six-team NHL had only two rounds back then - of the 1952 playoffs. But that's the least of what I saw - and still see.

I saw opponents - enemies - getting in each other's faces in only the highest form of the expression. Their eyes meet as they firmly clasp hands. From beneath a bandage over Richard's left eye, blood runs to his chin. Henry, his right eye blackened, is bent, as if in reverence, at the waist.

Clearly, they'd been to war against each other. And now it was over and everything was OK. There it was - self-respect, mutual respect, respect for the game - hard evidence of an ideology in the snap of a camera. One man's team had lost, but it was a picture of two winners.

This wasn't a Norman Rockwell print or some cornball impressionism painted for the cover of Boys' Life. This was a photo. And at 10, and before some avuncular voice (why do I hear Dick Enberg?) could be heard saying, "Kids, this is what sports are supposed to be about," perhaps I'd already seen.

Richard died in 2000. Last week, a newspaper blurb noted that Henry, who played for the Rangers just before and just after World War II, had passed.

I tore the short obit from the newspaper and headed downstairs to find that photo. Books I hadn't opened in years were yanked from shelves, skimmed, then discarded. Come on, already, I know I have it . . . then there it was. And nothing had changed. I stared at it. There we were, again, just the three of us.

I needed to be told that I'm not crazy. I called Larry Brooks, our NHL columnist. We're about the same age. He hadn't yet heard that Henry had died, but the moment I told him, we time-machined right to that photo. He, too, first saw it - and was grabbed by it - when he was a kid.

I called John Halligan, the former Rangers publicist who now serves the NHL as an archivist. Of course, he recalled that photo. "Are you kidding?" He sent a copy to The Post. Too many sports fans, we agreed, have never seen it.

Halligan also sent a story by Dave Stubbs from Sunday's Montreal Gazette, a piece inspired by the passing of Henry - and by that photo, taken April 8, 1952 in the Montreal Forum.

The photographer is unknown, although Halligan's research tells us it apparently first appeared in Montreal's La Presse and likely was taken by either Jacques Lemercier or Roger St. Jean.

Stubbs wrote that Richard, in the second period of that Game 7, had been knocked cold, then returned late in regulation to score the winner. He'd later go into convulsive shock. Henry's eyes had been blackened by a broken nose, suffered in Game 6.

To me, it's the most important sports photo ever taken. Maybe it's why I've become so despondent over how sports are now sold, especially to kids. Perhaps it's why I detest bad winners and those who so purposefully demonstrate their immodesty for cameras - and are rewarded for it. Perhaps it's why I go into convulsive shock when ESPN cuts away from the handshakes at the conclusion of a Stanley Cup series.

Could that photo have left such a mark? Ya never know. But thanks for listening.