FanPost

More Than A Feeling, or: Thoughts Before the Stanley Cup

The first time I went to a Pittsburgh Penguins game in person it was March 15, 2015, an afternoon game against the Red Wings. It was the second of back-to-back afternoon games, and Evgeni Malkin had been injured the game before against the Bruins. The whole team was injured and trying to battle through it - that game, Patric Hornqvist would crack his ribs but play through them to the end of the season.

I hardly remember the game, honestly. I was in such a haze of overwhelmed excitement that unless I had pictures, I’d think going to it was all some weirdly vivid dream I had. One of the pictures I took was of this guy:

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You can’t see in this picture, but on his right sleeve, he had each year the Penguins had won the Stanley Cup embroidered. He was actually in the season ticket holder section two over from mine and I vaulted over and ducked under partitions to get his attention, and the bemused security guards let me and told me not to do it again. The guy wearing the coat was extremely gracious about posing and excited to show me every piece of loving detail he’d put into this custom piece of magnificence. "This spring I’ll be adding another year to it!" he said, and we both laughed and agreed he would. I don’t think either of us really believed it, though.

The Penguins lost that game 6-1, but that one goal was scored by Sidney Crosby twenty feet in front of me, so I left there as happy as if the score had been reversed. Last year in the playoffs, I knew the team was too injured to even make it past the first round. My only prayer was that we wouldn’t be swept. We weren’t, and I was satisfied.

Starting in September watching the preseason rookie showcases, I had a feeling about this year’s Pittsburgh Penguins. Saying that sounds like I’m smarter than I am, since I always have a feeling about the Penguins. Normally, common sense takes over sometime mid-season and I go, "well, I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, but this year isn’t our year". That was the weird part, though - even in the darkest days before Mike Johnston got fired, I still had that feeling. I went to my first game in Boston on December 18 this year. It was the second game of Mike Sullivan’s tenure and the team was still a mess. We lost to the Bruins. I still had that feeling. I went again to the game in Boston on February 24. We got shellacked. I still had that feeling. I went to my second game in Pittsburgh on April 3, the Penguins’ final home game and played against the Flyers. This was the first game I went to that we won, which was good because I was starting to think I was a shitty luck charm. It was by far the best game I’d been to, because everyone in the crowd had the feeling with me. The players had the feeling. You could almost touch it, it was so palpable, the this year is our year that exuded from every seat (except the seats held by people in orange, it’s never their year).

The Penguins are now a win away from the Stanley Cup. Even if we somehow fuck this up (and I knocked on wood before and after writing this), we are one win away from the Stanley Cup. We did it. Heck, the Sharks did it, too. How many people had written them off last year? If you didn’t raise your hand, you’re a liar. No one thought they’d get this far. No one thought they’d even make it past the Kings in the first round. That’s the magic of the Stanley Cup that’s easy to forget in the highly binary nature of sports: even if you don’t win the actual thing, getting this close is winning. And, if the 2008 Penguins are anything to go by, it can also be a preview to something even better. It’s a sign you as a team are doing the right thing. It’s validation. It’s redemption.


If the Penguins win tonight, I don’t expect to have a big reaction. I’m not a good person to film for any sort of immediate reaction to anything, because by nature I’m a processor. I’ll probably feel relieved, honestly, that I can put in a laundry of all my Penguins shirts that are extremely smelly but that haven’t been washed since April when I went to Pittsburgh, to say nothing of the lucky socks that I only wear during games and haven’t washed since March. I probably won’t fall asleep until 3:00 AM and when I wake up tomorrow morning I’ll cry over something inappropriate, like how proud I am that the banana I’m eating for breakfast is perfectly ripe because it worked so hard to achieve that ripeness.

I don’t plan on buying a plane ticket to go to the parade. I’ll probably try to go to Conor Sheary’s Cup Day, assuming there's a portion open to the public, because he’s from the town two towns over from mine. I’ll also go because I saw his first game against the Bruins, where he skated out to warmups two minutes before everyone and looked around TD Garden with an awed expression, like every dream he’d ever had growing up just came true all at once. They had - he grew up an undersized but skilled kid in Boston. He must have gone to dozens of games and thought one day I’ll be doing that. He never grew and was undrafted. He had no reason to think he’d make it. He made it. He played his heart out in December, and I’ve loved him ever since. I had a feeling about him, too.

If we win, my happiness will be a slow, contented happiness. And there will also be sadness, because if we win the Cup, what will I root for? I grew up as a Red Sox fan in the late 90’s, and my antipathy for dynasties trumps everything, even my love for the Penguins. I guess I’ll root for what I do every year, which is that we do our best with the team we have and the injuries we’re battling. We’re the Penguins, so I expect we’ll always be battling the injuries more than any actual roster deficiencies.

Either way, though, there’s some guy in western Pennsylvania who’s calling up his coat guy. "Tony!" he’s saying (because I’ve decided his coat guy is called Tony), "Tony, you gotta get out your fuzzy number maker, I feel like this one’s a winner."

I hope his coat sleeve looks awesome. I hope next season, he poses for a whole lot of pictures.

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