May 22 2008
Win It For…
In the fall of 2004, as the Red Sox stood poised to complete the greatest comeback in MLB history, a message board thread cut to the heart of New England baseball fans. Begun by a teacher in Connecticut, the main post was titled “Win It For…,” and it was simply a list of all the people this fan wanted the Red Sox to win the World Series for. By the time his team completed its first championship run since 1918, the thread had swelled to over 300 pages, a cathartic tome that let go of 86 years of frustration.
On the eve after the 2006 AFC Championship game, after the Steelers had walloped the Broncos to punch their ticket to Super Bowl XL, I cribbed the idea from Red Sox Nation. On our old blog, I posted a “Win It For…” thread for the Steelers asking people to share what the first Steelers title in more than 25 years would mean to them and their friends and loved ones. It didn’t spread to anywhere near 300 pages, but there were still some special responses and a nice reminder of the uniting power of sports.
With the Penguins set to play in their first Stanley Cup Finals since 1992 on Saturday night, I thought it was time for another one of these threads. It hasn’t been 86 years since the Pens last title, or even 26 like the Steelers; but in the 16 seasons since they downed the Blackhawks, there have been enough peaks and valleys, enough twists, turns and heartbreaks that it might has well have been.
Without further ado…
-Win it for Colby Armstrong and Erik Christensen, neither were superstars, but both were key parts of a core group that brought the team out of the mid-decade doldrums. What a better way to remember that than to have their names etched together with their old teammates on the Stanley Cup.
-Win it for my mother and grandmother, who, without hesitation, let me skip dessert on Mother’s Day to watch Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals.
-Win it for my cousin Will. He’s too young to remember the two Stanley Cup teams, but old enough to remember all the playoff frustration that came in the years just after. Just under a decade ago, while he was finishing up middle school, his family moved from Pittsburgh to Pierre, SD. The sports loyalties of youth sometimes fade in those situations, but Will’s passion never faded, even through four last straight seasons, aided by streaming broadcasts, message boards, and the Post-Gazette online sports section. He’s spent the past two semesters, his junior year of college, studying abroad in Hong Kong, no doubt tracking the team as feverishly as if he went to school down the street from Mellon Arena. Will’s plane back from Asia touches down in Pittsburgh on Saturday afternoon, and assuming there’s no traffic, he should be in front of TV by faceoff.
-Win it for the Karasic’s the most generous family on the planet. They’ve given a poor liberal arts grad a chance to hold one of the hottest tickets in town 5-6 times a year for the last three years.
-Win it for Marian Hossa, Sergei Gonchar, and Gary Roberts. The conventional wisdom is that the Penguins core of young talent is still a few years away from peaking. That may be true, but due to salary restrictions and age it’s virtually impossible that these three players will be in Pittsburgh beyond the end of 2009. All have made invaluable contributions to this incredible run, from OT winners, inspired back checking, stout defensive work down to Roberts’s pure passion in Game 1 of the playoffs, the spark that lit the powder keg.
-Win it for Tina, my office manager, who’s rediscovered her passion for hockey over the last two years. Two falls ago, I had to explain to her what offsides was; now she’ll come in to work wondering if the Penguins mistake the night before was going too early to the one-four delay.
-Win it for Shaggy, a true Penguins fan in every sense. Thanks to this team, it’s come to be accepted that we’ll both be late returning to work after our Tuesday hour conversation.
-Win it for Mario Lemieux, the one and only reason there’s still a hockey team in Pittsburgh, let alone one that’s four wins away from a championship. Perhaps I’m biased, but I can’t imagine there’s another team in professional sports that treats its fans as well as the Penguins do, and that’s an attitude that starts at the top. An adopted son in a town that doesn’t always take well to outsiders, Mario decided to hold onto his financial stake in the team after the new arena deal was completed. “It’s time to have some fun with this,” he said at the time. Well, I think it would be pretty fun for him this season and reach perhaps the one goal he never accomplished as a player: the chance to raise the Stanley Cup on home ice. So win it for Mario, in four or six if you can. Although something tells me five or seven would be just fine with him too.
- Win it for Sid, Gino, Gronk and Flower; all under 25 and living the dream.
-Win it for Matt, Zavo and Phil, my best buddies from high school, and with whom Penguins hockey has been one of the constant threads running through our friendship. The first time we went to a hockey game together was winter break during our freshman year’s of college. It was December 2001, Jaromir Jagr had been traded, Ivan Hlinka and the Penguins were already beginning to free-fall towards the bottom of the standings. The seats were partially obstructed, we couldn’t see the far end of the ice, and the Senators thrashed the Penguins 5-2. It was a trend that would continue for the next four seasons; we didn’t see a winning game in person until the 2006 home opener. That shouldn’t really be surprising though, as the Penguins during that period lingered near the bottom of the NHL standings, never a playoff contender let a lone a championship caliber team. In spite of that, there’s probably nothing during the course the last eight years we’ve shared more laughs, joys and frustrations over. It’s what sports are all about really. Win it so that we can share a championship together.
Add your own in the comments…