MONTREAL — Here came the return of best-on-best hockey and here came the wall of noise at the Bell Centre, crashing down in delirium over the ice.

They roared for Sidney Crosby.

They got louder with the introduction of legends for each of the four teams competing at this best-on-best renewal.

They lost it for Mario Lemieux. They belted “O Canada” so loud it drowned out the singer.

They watched Team Canada beat Team Sweden, 4-3, to open the 4 Nations Face-Off in a game that went 360 degrees from blowout to blown lead to ecstasy in the form of Mitch Marner’s overtime winner, then they lost it some more.

“You tell 8- or 10-year-old Mitch that he scored an overtime goal [assisted] by Sidney Crosby, a guy he looked up to since Day 1,” Marner said, “it’s pretty crazy. I’m sure my family’s gonna be really excited about that one.”

The stars here were Crosby, Cale Makar, Nathan MacKinnon and Connor McDavid. This was about the foursome that delivered a spellbinding power play goal 56 seconds into the match with McDavid feeding Crosby feeding MacKinnon into an open net.

And this was about Team Canada, in Canada, giving a loud reminder of what hockey supremacy looks like.

Sweden did not record a shot on goal until 15:15 into the match, when Gustav Forsling’s wrister went harmlessly into Jordan Binnington’s glove.

By then, Canada had already scored twice, the crowd had already started singing “Ole” and McDavid had already put in a handful of shifts where he looked like a man among boys.

It looked like this would be easy.

It was not.

It would take overtime in the end, meaning Canada took just two of three points, with Sweden getting one, and it would take Marner, finishing a pulsating extra period 6:06 into three-on-three play by ripping a shot past Filip Gustavsson after Crosby charged up the ice and found him for his third assist of the evening.

“I think for Team Sweden,” defenseman Erik Karlsson said, “that was a little bit of a nut-kicker.”

This was the sort of game — and the sort of finish — that left everybody in the vicinity needing a cigarette.

“I think people maybe have this tournament confused for an All-Star Game,” McDavid said. “It’s not an All-Star Game. It’s a competitive event. Everyone wants to win. You saw that tonight.”

Canada never turned this into the sort of blowout on the scoreboard that it looked like on the ice for the first 20 minutes, with the game settling down, Sweden finding traction and turning this into a real game just like that.

The first sign of trouble came midway through the second period when Binnington let up a short-side goal from Jonas Brodin, making a game Canada had owned almost completely 2-1.

Indeed, the worries about Canada’s situation in net were validated more than a little bit Wednesday, with Binnington less than convincing until overtime, when he made a perfect four saves, including on Adrian Kempe to set up Crosby on the rush.

A new one cropped up, too, in the form of Shea Theodore leaving the game early in the second with an apparent right wrist injury and not returning, coach Jon Cooper later saying he would miss the rest of the tournament.

Crosby appeared to restore order when he delivered his second assist of the night at 17:28 of the second, feeding Mark Stone off the rush after wheeling around at the bottom of the circle to pick out a perfect pass.

But things continued to get unsettling for Canada when Adrian Kempe strode into the slot and beat Binnington clean to make it 3-2 less than two minutes into the third.

And when Joel Eriksson Ek followed a Canadian icing by tying the game at three off Jesper Bratt’s cross-crease feed at the 8:59 mark, a pall of silence temporarily fell over the Bell Centre.

That was enough to send it to overtime, where the noise would be restored in due course.

“It was everything I would’ve expected and even more than that,” McDavid said of this return to best-on-best, his first time representing Team Canada at such an event. “To play here in Montreal, the fans get off to a great start like that, it was great. It was really, really fun.

“It was everything I hoped for.”