EDMONTON —  It’s the curse that rides shotgun next to the absolute blessing of watching the sport’s finest talent on a nightly basis. Or playing with that player.

After another five-point night by Connor McDavid, in a thrilling 6-5 win over Carolina on Thursday, this scribe was lucky enough/dutybound to perform the task of trying to find a new angle for the “How great a player is Connor McDavid?” storyline.

I could publish of book my columns on this topic (it wouldn’t sell), and McDavid isn’t even 30 years old yet.

And, of course, his teammates get to relive the weekly task of standing in front of a group of reporters, each of us trying to find a new route into the most travelled destination in Edmonton hockey history. AG — after Gretzky — of course.

“Connor broke a Gretzky record: 31 points now in this first 10 games,” a media member said, inside a question for Leon Draisaitl. “Those are video-game numbers!”

Draisaitl had five points Thursday as well. But there he stood, being asked the “How awesome is Connor?” question for about the 2,000th time in his career.

“What do you want me to say? It’s just not real,” Draisaitl said. “He’s maybe the greatest player to ever play, in my books. It’s a pleasure to share the ice with him, a pleasure to learn from him every day. He deserves everything.”

With a five-point night, McDavid set an Oilers record for the most points through 10 games in a season with 31, surpassing Wayne Gretzky in 1984-85. And McDavid is one of just four players — alongside Gretzky, Mario Lemieux (three times) and Mike Bossy — to start a season with 30 points in the first 10 games.

Lemieux holds the record with 37 points in the opening 10 games of the 1988-89 season, the year he finished with 199 points.

As the Oilers ran their record to 8-1-1 with the shootout win, McDavid had two second assists, a primary assist, and two goals in the third period, including one on a fluky bounce off of Jesperi Kotkaniemi’s skate to tie the game at 18:32. But for the second straight night the power play won Edmonton a game the even-strength play likely did not deserve to win, with back-to-back three-for-five nights against Minnesota and the Hurricanes.

“It feels like they’re out there the whole game because they’re so talented,” Carolina head coach Rod Brind’Amour said of McDavid and Draisaitl. “But when you give them the ice, the power plays, that’s death. They’re two of the best players maybe ever to play when there’s that much space. You can’t do that.”

It’s just obscene what McDavid is doing in his 29-year old season, ripping through the competition even more surgically than in years past.

His work on the power play is Michelangelo, his even-strength game more Bo Jackson.

He leads the NHL with a plus-18, has a shooting percentage of 32 per cent, and his 19 even-strength points would put him behind only Draisaitl in NHL scoring. On Thursday he became the second player in NHL history to record three five-point outings in his first 10 games of a season. (Lemieux did it in eight games in 1992-93 and 1988-89.)

Incredibly, McDavid seems to have somehow gotten even better this season, with his 30th birthday due on Jan. 13.

“You learn, right?” Draisaitl reasoned. “When he was 24, he was just as flashy, just as fast. But there are little details that maybe weren’t as great. Now, his game is as complete as it gets, and he hasn’t lost a step offensively. I mean, you really just run out of words.

“No pun intended, but I’ll leave it at that.”

We’ve told the story 100 times about McDavid and an opposing defenceman’s gap. D-men travel through the NHL, night after night, and find their gauge on what kind of gap they need to properly defend a rush by an NHL forward.

Then they arrive in Edmonton, and the math’s all wrong.

There’s the tenet of hockey, that space is the currency for creativity. Just like Gretzky’s buttonhook inside the blue-line created the necessary space for his wizardry back in the 80s, tighter defending and better skaters have forced McDavid to find his space in a far faster game with much less room.

The spin move he made on Sean Walker, who challenged him aggressively on the penalty kill, left the Hurricane facing the other direction and gave McDavid the time he needed to put a puck on Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’ tape for a powerplay goal.

For every great McDavid play, there is a precursor — a side step, a cross-over, that patented spin move — that buys the time and space to make the play that ends up in the net. It’s his cheat code: make a crazy athletic move to create the time for the unbelievably heady play that makes a goal.

“It’s just like any other player,” said Carolina’s Juuso Valimaki. “You get the feeling, you get hot and you feel like you can do anything out there. Obviously they’re special players.”

Sorry, Jusso. You’re only partly right.

McDavid feels like he can do anything out there right now.

But it’s not ”just like any other player.”