EDMONTON — The people who reside inside these dressing rooms — the players, specifically — build monuments for teammates like Calvin Pickard.

Meanwhile, the people who never set foot inside — namely, fans — can at times eschew the value of a beloved teammate. Someone who always knew just the right moment when a subtle one-liner was required to cut through the tension of a Stanley Cup Final intermission, or when someone needed a shot of “we kid because we love” when their game had run into some bad luck.

So at time like this, when the Edmonton Oilers are breaking eggs to re-make their Stanley Cup omelette — one that has lacked just the slightest dash of spice, the most tangential ingredient to get them over the top — it falls to those of us who live among the fans, yet walk in and out of these dressing rooms after all the blood has been cleaned up and the team bonding has ceased, to try to explain it all.

Here’s what we’ve learned about good guys and backup goalies over the years:

• One, if you can’t play — if you can’t help the team win — no joke you crack or cheer you lead will help you last. The players know who can help and who can’t, and they don’t have any time for the latter.

• Two, if you CAN play, a backup doesn’t get enough ice time that he can just turn off his responsibilities when he’s not standing between the pipes in a game. You take extra shots before and after practice; you support your starter through thick and thin (See: Skinner, Stuart); you figure out what role, which emotion, or what intangible gap needs filling among the other 19 guys inside that dressing room, and you provide it.

“Honestly, I think he helped a lot of guys in here, just taking some pressure off in big moments,” Matias Ekholm said, about 10 minutes before we learned that Pickard was not claimed on waivers Monday. “It’s not like he’s saying something every night. It’s just him being him:

“He’s a nice, loose guy, who isn’t afraid,” Ekholm said. “Whether it’s a Stanley Cup Final or Game 47 (of the season) — he’ll be joking around the room. He’ll just be making you less tense.

“Love the guy. He’s been nothing but awesome for us.”

We don’t know the following to be true, but we sense it is: In a hockey room, the bottom-of-the-roster guys are more important than they are in a baseball clubhouse, an NBA locker room, or on an NFL team where the backup corner only gets snaps in garbage time, barring injury.

Pickard started 31 games last season and appeared in 36. He bailed out a struggling Skinner, helping the Oilers to advance through Rounds 1 and 2 with a starter that likely would not have, posting a 7-1 playoff record.

So, for general manager Stan Bowman, removing a Pickard — or a Troy Stecher, the D-man equivalent — is a move made at his own peril.

Alas, it’s a move he makes because the greater good demanded a change in the goaltending landscape here.

“We can’t win with Pickard as our backup,” said nobody, ever.

But when you shake up the jujube jar, sometimes you pull out different colours than you thought you would. The Oilers’ nets belong to Tristan Jarry and Connor Ingram now, and the rest of the guys just have to suck it up and deal with it.

“I can’t shut off the emotions. He’s one of my best friends — I’m going to miss him no matter what,” Leon Draisaitl said of Pickard. “But at the end of the day, like, I’ve got to continue to do what I do … whether Picks is here or not.”

As a guy who has played enough NHL games this season, Pickard qualifies to get the Olympic break off. After that, he may go to AHL Bakersfield, where the Condors went 10-2-2 in January, and Connor Ungar posted five wins and a .956 save percentage.

Or perhaps, with too many ‘tendies in the system, Bowman can find another AHL team that needs a netminder on loan.

Either way, there will be a period of mourning in this Oilers’ room, and a flurry of texts.

“I think I speak for everyone in here,” Draisaitl said. “He’s one of the greatest teammates all of us have had. He played a lot of big games, had a lot of big wins.”

We asked Draisaitl about the whole brotherhood thing, and why it matters so much inside the walls of a hockey room.

“When you go through stretches like the last two years, you build friendships,” said an assistant captain of a team that’s gone to the final NHL game played for two seasons now, then collapsed in a room that housed no champagne, no shiny Cup, and no celebrating family members. “It’s probably easier to get really tight when you go that far. You really have to dig in, and you really find out who you can go to war with. We’ve been close; we’ve been really deep and far.

“You find out a lot about human beings and the way they are in stressful situations,” he said, before adding, “but building friendships in this world, at some point, comes to an end.

“Not the friendship, but the being together.”

As it turned out, Pickard remains Oilers property. Which means, well, you never know, right?

“He’s gonna be OK,” Draisaitl said. “He’s a great goalie, a great human being — we love him in here.

“And who knows? Maybe, down the stretch, he’s going to be back and playing big games for us.”