Phil Bourque was willing to do whatever it took to succeed in his NHL career.

What he didn’t realize at the time was that, more than 15 years after retiring, he’d be paying a different price. One for having multiple concussions as a player.

At 53, Bourque, the Penguins’ radio analyst who was a member of their Stanley Cup-winning teams in 1991 and 1992, is beginning to experience memory lapses that he can’t shrug off as simply a byproduct of advancing age.

“There have been big gaps the last six or eight months,” he said. “Sometimes you think, ‘Well, geez, am I just tired, or have I been pushing myself too hard?’

“But it’s abnormally long gaps in memory and not being able to recall the simplest things, like people’s names who you’re around all the time. Complete blanks.

“We all have that moment where you kind of forget something, and it comes right back to you. Now, it doesn’t come back at all, and it’s actually kind of scary. People that you see every single day, you’re like, ‘What’s your name again?’ “

Those lapses, Bourque said, happen about a half-dozen times per month and have been occurring with increasing regularity.

“I don’t know what to do to rectify it,” he said. “It’s not like you can take a pill or you can go for a longer walk.

“It’s one of those things where you cross your fingers and hope it comes back to you. I’m 53. I shouldn’t be forgetting things this frequently at this age.”

Bourque estimates that he suffered “a dozen, for sure” concussions while playing hockey - “It’s hard to remember them all, right?” he said - although only a few were formally diagnosed. That total includes “probably five times when I was knocked out cold.”

Bourque never was shy about throwing his body around — a Pittsburgh Press profile in the 1980s described him as being responsible for “more hits than Bruce Springsteen” — and admits that “I probably lied to the trainer numerous times” about being ready to return from a concussion when he really wasn’t.

Seven days was the most he would allow himself to sit out for one of those, Bourque said.

It was, by Bourque’s reckoning, a matter of professional survival.

“Every single time, I know I came back earlier than I should have because I feared for my job,” he said.

Although Bourque got the vast majority of his concussions on hockey rinks, his first came on a street in his hometown of Chelmsford, Mass., when he was 9.

Bourque, whose only protective gear that day was a full head of hair, recalls doing a full face-plant, tearing flesh from his forehead to his chin.

A gruesome accident, but probably not as bad as one he had while playing junior hockey for Kingston in the Ontario Hockey League.

“I was tied up with a guy in front of the net and I never saw the shot coming,” he said. “Guy took a one-timer from the point and, as I turned to look where the puck was, it hit me square under the nose. People have said they saw my feet go up over my head and I had an out-of-body experience where I was sitting in the stands.”

A few years later, while playing an American Hockey League game in Hershey, he was rendered unconscious again.