There's no way to predict what a 17-year-old might say, but I halfway expected Raleigh native Matt Gellatly on Wednesday to come up with something like, "That's one small step for Matt and one giant leap for Mattkind."

It turned out that Gellatly, an Enloe High School junior who has been drafted by the Ontario Hockey League's Saginaw Spirit, is much too reserved to put a personal spin on Neil Armstrong's moon-landing quote.

But in his own way, he is an athletic pioneer. North Carolina natives have pulled on NHL sweaters about as regularly as people have walked on the moon.

Gellatly, who was born at Rex Hospital, has a shot -- although it's probably a long shot -- to make the NHL.

There were two North Carolina natives on NHL rosters in 2007-08 -- Los Angeles' Patrick O'Sullivan of Winston-Salem and Columbus' Jared Boll of Charlotte. Both spent about as much time in the state as Ron Paul. Each moved elsewhere before either was old enough to differentiate a puck from a putt.

Gellatly is an entirely different case.

He eats barbecue pork. He plays baseball. With a 4.7 grade-point average, he's getting letters of interest from Ivy League schools, one of which led him to ask his father, Jim, "Hey, Dad, is Yale a pretty good school?"

"Almost everything is new to me, and I really don't know what to expect. I just know it's all very exciting," Gellatly said.

Gellatly, a forward, is the first player on the Carolina Junior Hurricanes to be selected for the OHL, one of Canada's three top-tier major-junior hockey leagues.

A 5-foot-11, 185-pounder, Gellatly scored 19 goals and had 17 assists in 36 games with the Junior Canes in the 2007-08 season.

The odds are that he'll never play in the NHL. He was picked in the 15th and final round of the OHL draft on May 3 and is far more interested in playing at the college level than in the NHL feeder system.

"I just want to see how I stack up," he said. "But I know that it's almost impossible to get there [to the NHL]."

The stack-up process will begin this summer, when Gellatly joins other Saginaw picks during a tryout camp. If he puts on a stunning performance, the option will be there for an extended stay. If not, Gellatly will pursue his plans to attend prep school in Connecticut and from there, another period of decision-making about his hockey career.

"It's a long process in hockey unless you're just so good that you sort of just breeze through the different levels," Gellatly said.

"The teams make their selections based on all kinds of factors, and I'm still not sure where I am or how I rate. But getting picked in the OHL gives me a chance to more or less find out. ... I think college hockey is where I'll end up, but it will be fun to see how I play against these other guys."

If nothing else, it will be interesting to follow Gellatly's career. And maybe the career of his brother, Kyle, a 13-year-old defenseman.

Either way, youth hockey is finding its niche in the Triangle.

"Lots of us are getting into it," Gellatly said. "Most of the guys on my team just got interested when the Hurricanes came to Raleigh. It's taken a little while, but I think we're a pretty good team now. I know there will be lots of other players who are good enough to play at a higher level. It'll be a lot of fun to see how many there are."