The Stanley Cup Finals

The Penguins and the Red Wings fight it out in the Finals beginning tonight. The two teams match up well together, as both like to possess the puck and rely on skill more than grit to win games. I don't take issue with the majority view that the Penguins have an edge in the quality of their forwards that's probably not as significant as the edge Detroit has on the blueline. But like everybody else, I'm just anxious to see what the teams look like on the ice together, given that they haven't played a game of any consequence against each other for quite a while, and they have no playoff history whatsoever. But even if the two teams don't have a significant history with each other, I do have one with the two of them.

Back in January of 1989, for an early eighteenth birthday present, I received tickets to a Penguins-Red Wings game. It was my first opportunity to see Mario Lemieux play. ¹ And ever since I'd seen John Hughes stick a Gordie Howe jersey on Alan Ruck, I'd been an admirer of the winged wheel and was flirting with sports bigamy. We had an extra ticket, so I decided I'd ask to the game a beautiful and tall girl I'd been working up the courage to ask out for a few months. It would have been a bad idea to make that our first date, so the upcoming game put a deadline on me getting over my shyness and asking her out beforehand. We had dinner a few times and went to a movie or two, but the game was our first time spending hours and hours together.

Our seats were right on the glass in the corner next to the tunnel where the Red Wings came out and close to the goal where the Penguins shoot twice. With nothing but rounded plexiglass separating you from the players it's hard not to be dazzled by the size and speed of the players. The game was the sort of firewagon score-a-rama that would make anyone a fan and which stopped happening after the '92'93 season. I've been unsuccessful in tracking down a box score, but the Penguins won by something like 10-8. Lemieux was in the midst of his 199-point season and the Wings' captain, Steve Yzerman, was blossoming into a superstar around that time. But it's funny to think of the context of that first prolonged date. Hockey games are fairly raucous occasions, and not the easiest place to converse. We were at that early uncertain point in a potential relationship which, for two shy people, feels like a dance of carefully-chosen words and overscrutinized gestures. But we had a great time and saw a fantastic game. Next week, between games three and four of the series, that girl and I will celebrate our fifteenth anniversary.

Really, it seems pointless for me to make a prediction about the series, as I'm wholly unable to separate heart from head. But I'm also drawn to the potential to will this series to the conclusion I want to see, so I'll say the Penguins will win in six games, and then skate the Stanley Cup around the old barn on the hill.

The end.

1 I hadn't even seen #66 play on television. Around that time, there wasn't any significant television coverage of the NHL, even locally. Cable TV saw the light a year or two later, and all of the Penguin games have been broadcast on cable networks since the early nineties. Ironically, the local cable television situation regarding the Penguins is actually worse today than it was in the early nineties. I was able to watch every game of the Penguins' '91 and '92 Stanley Cup playoff runs on cable TV with local announcers, and couldn't have cared less that it wasn't being covered nationally. This year, every game from the middle of the second round on with the exception of two has been broadcast exclusively by the Outdoor Life Network, which isn't available everywhere in Western Pennsylvania.