My one abiding memory of sports in North America comes from the Stanley Cup Finals. The event took place in Denver, and I happened to be watching one time zone and a hell of a long walk away in Los Angeles. It was game seven of the 2001 series, the Colorado Avalanche hosting the New Jersey Devils at the shiny new Pepsi Center. With seconds left in the game and leading by one goal, the home team were arrowing in on their second championship in five years. What was remarkable here, though, was not what was happening on the ice, but rather what was happening near it.
Sat on the Colorado Avalanche bench was Ray Bourque, No77, the finest NHL defenseman since the great Bobby Orr. For 20½ seasons a Boston Bruin, Bourque finally requested a trade out of Beantown in order that he might challenge for the Stanley Cup. A little over a year later, in downtown Denver, he was doing just that. The clock ticked down its final seconds - 10, 9, 8 ... Bourque sat on the bench, shaking visibly, boiling with tears. More than two decades since making his NHL debut the defenseman had never won the Stanley Cup, a drought longer than any other player in the league. But now it was happening. 7, 6, 5 ... You could see his team-mates talking to him, telling him - Ray, get on the ice! 4, 3, 2 ... Ray! Get on, now!
When one second fell to zero, Colorado Avalanche captain Joe Sakic accepted the Stanley Cup from NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. Instead of hoisting the three foot tall, 35½lb trophy above his head, Sakic broke with tradition and instead handed the prize to his team-mate. This was Ray Bourque's last ever appearance as a professional hockey player, the moment his life as an athlete could - and perhaps should - come to an end. No77 lifting the Stanley Cup above his head after 1,826 games was an image so fitting, so perfect, that even Sports Illustrated placed it on the cover. "At Last!" screamed the headline.
In terms of drama, in terms of unmissable sporting tension, this is the kind of thing I'm after, and this is the kind of thing the Stanley Cup finals are able to offer. This year's match-up between the Western Conference's Detroit Red Wings and the Eastern Conference's Pittsburgh Penguins is as compelling - or at least as potentially compelling - a clash as the NHL has seen for years. And while it won't end with one of the greatest players of his generation retiring the very second he hoists the Cup above his head (everyone in tears, asking themselves "who needs funding for the arts when you've got this?"), this could nevertheless still be a classic encounter.
Being an arena-half-empty kind of a guy, let me first deal with my concerns. The Red Wings have been dominant all season long, and come the playoffs they continued that mean streak by hitting the petrol and losing just four games on their way to the finals. At times they played with a fluency that rendered opponents virtually invisible. The Wings' roster features eight players from the class of 2002, the last time they lifted the Stanley Cup, and in the NHL this kind of experience is a priceless commodity. Add everything together and you have a hockey team that gets its motors running quicker than most, if not all. If their opponents cannot manage to do the same then the Wings could gain a hold on this series that will kill it before it has even really begun.
Then again, their opponents are the Pittsburgh Penguins, a team who do not flatter to deceive. Maybe it's because Sidney Crosby, the team's star player, looks so much like a movie star that you can't imagine him getting his jersey dirty, but it seems that Pittsburgh don't get the credit they deserve. At least not by me, they don't. I couldn't believe it when they beat the New York Rangers in five games in the conference semi-finals; I was even more bemused when they dispatched the Philadelphia Flyers with similar ease in the following round. On their march to the finals, the Pen's have lost just two matches, playing with an efficiency and ruthlessness that makes the Red Wings appear almost flabby.
For reasons I can't properly explain, I find myself pulling for the Penguins. The Pennsylvanian club may have been NHL members for 41 years, but for many of those years their tenure has been sketchy at best. They play in a knackered old arena (the Mellon Arena, nicknamed the Igloo) that has a leaking roof and a general appearance that suggests it might fall down at any second. The team that plays there are similarly unreliable. In 1984 the Pen's cheated, tanking their final games in order to finish last in the league and thus secure the No1 pick from that summer's draft. That player was Mario Lemieux, who not only became a superstar on the ice but also a saviour off it. Lemieux now heads the team's ownership group, and in recent years has managed to stave off Chapter 11 bankruptcy and proposed moves to both Portland and Kansas City. Oh, and Lemieux is also responsible for the Penguins' two Stanley Cup championships to date, in 1991 and 1992.
It would be a foolish or drunk hockey pundit who discounted the Red Wings, though. This is a club that is never forced to rebuild, it simply evolves. Current superstars Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk were taken in the later rounds of the draft (171st and 210th picks respectively) and both are testament not only to the Red Wings' eye for detail but also the coaching staff's ability to find and polish unfancied diamonds to the point where they become championship rings. Their nickname - The Big Red Machine - may have been coined to describe the Soviet Union teams of the 1970s and '80s, but it works just as well for the Wings of the Motor City.
To be perfectly honest, I don't really care who wins this season's Stanley Cup, I just want hockey as a spectacle to hold its own. This is the only major sport whose championship is not shown on network television in the United States, viewable instead only on a relatively obscure cable channel (Versus). The NHL want shooting for allowing their broadcast deal with ESPN to expire, and while I am entirely confident that the advent of High Definition TV will rescue hockey as a televised sport (heavens, I can see the puck!) the next few seasons are key in determining whether the game's stock rises or falls. Each summer, grumblings can be heard to the effect that no one watches the Stanley Cup Finals, so much so that this chorus appears to have gathered a life of its own. Ignore this drone and instead concentrate on what happens on the ice. Let's hope the NHL provides a spectacle that is worthy of the time and attention of those of us who do care to watch.
My prediction? Red Wings in six.
