RALEIGH - You won't find Jorge Alves' name on any Carolina Hurricanes roster, but he has a 2006 Stanley Cup championship ring and is a "can-do" guy for the team. Need a goalie to play opposite Cam Ward in the informal RecZone workouts? Alves can do that.

Need someone to help equipment manager Wally Tatomir sharpen skates after workouts? Alves can do it.

Sell used equipment, help do laundry, clean up the locker room? Alves can do all that, too.

At 29, Alves is doing all he can to stay in hockey, to find a place, to keep his dream alive. Making it to the NHL may be out of his grasp, but Alves has always hoped to find just one minor league team that will give him the opportunity to be its No. 1 goaltender rather than a fill-in.

"Whenever I see Jorge," Ward said, "the first thing that comes to mind is Rudy, from the movie. He's very determined."

Alves is 5 feet 8, but don't sell him short. He spent four years in the Marine Corps after graduating from high school in Stoughton, Mass., surviving boot camp at Parris Island and later grueling jungle warfare training in Japan.

Going into the Corps meant giving up his chance to play junior or college hockey. But if he has a regret, it's that his active enlistment ended just two months before Sept. 11, 2001, and that he has seen so many of his buddies deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I'd turn on a TV and it was like, 'There's my unit going,' " he said. "It was like, what am I doing here, I should be there with them."

Alves thought of re-enlisting. But he had a fiancee, Amanda. He wanted to attend N.C. State.

"I had mixed emotions," he said.

In 2003 and 2004, he was the goaltender for N.C. State's club hockey team. From there, it was on to countless minor-league tryouts -- the first with the Fayetteville FireAntz of the Southern Professional Hockey League.

"Just my luck," he said, smiling. "It was the year of the [NHL] lockout, so 11 goalies were there. But one of the things the Marine Corps taught me was to keep going after my goals, to keep plugging away, plugging away."

The last few years have been a blur of different locales, leagues and hockey sweaters -- the FireAntz, Asheville Aces, Twin City Cyclones, Greenville Grrrowl, Charlotte Checkers, Pensacola Ice Pilots, Florida Everglades.

"They call me 'The Suitcase,' " Alves joked.

"The guy is insane," said Rick Alves, Jorge's fraternal twin. "He refuses to fail. He'll go wherever he thinks he can play, wherever he thinks he can get a shot.

"He's such a hard worker. He just needs one break, I think."

Alves did get a break, of sorts, when he fell in with the Hurricanes, handling odd jobs for Tatomir when he wasn't trying to find a place to play.

"I've been training him," Tatomir said. "He's got a heart of gold. He never gives up."

Alves earned his keep. He also earned a ring -- unexpected but gladly accepted -- when the Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup.

"It's great to wear when I'm with a [minor league] team," Alves said, laughing. "Players will ask, 'What is THAT?' I'll say, 'Oh, just my Stanley Cup ring.' "

In the RecZone workouts the last two weeks, Alves has put on the gear and taken the best shots a Rod Brind'Amour, Ray Whitney or Justin Williams can muster.

"I give him credit. He's working extremely hard," Ward said. "You see him out there competing and he looks like an NHL goalie on the other side."

The Canes skaters tease Alves about soft goals, and Chad LaRose playfully sent him sprawling behind the net Thursday. But Alves has made some big-time stops, too, once stoning forward Scott Walker on a breakaway.

Walker tried to go top shelf on Alves, but the goaltender snatched the puck out of the air.

"I thought I had him and then that little arm went up," Walker said with a grin.

Added Alves, "That happens once in a blue moon."

When the Canes' No. 2 goalie, Michael Leighton, comes in, Alves will put away the pads. He also realizes the time may be fast approaching when he may put up the pads and mask for good.

Alves and Amanda -- who he first met on his 20th birthday at an old Raleigh nightspot, The Club Zone, now the RecZone -- have an 8-month-old daughter, Madison. Last year, while with the Twin City Cyclones in Winston-Salem, Alves was backup goalie and equipment manager.

"I told him every once in a while we all have to get a real job," Tatomir said. "There's a job out there for him somewhere as an equipment guy. He'd do a good job. He's very neat and tidy."

Alves, who doesn't want to move his family, is unsure about his plans this season. Maybe the FireAntz again. Maybe not.

"Every now and again you think, well, you're probably not going to hit the NHL and you're getting older," Rick Alves said of his brother. "But if he doesn't do it, 10 years from now he's going to look back and say, 'I wonder if I just gave it ...'

"He could start a 9-to-5 today and then that's it. But he's a good guy, a good husband. If the worst part of his personality is that he's 'chasing a dream,' that's a pretty good bad trait, isn't it?"

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