Late but not Wrong: Sometimes it's not Worth Being Right

On Wednesday night, the Boston Bruins and Vancouver Canucks will step on the ice to put to rest a collective 80 years of futility, misery, and failure. Each team will seek to lift 35 lbs of Lord Stanley’s silver from the finely manicured hands of the NHL’s grinning marionette, league commissioner Gary Bettman, and, more importantly, lift itself from the nadir of mediocrity, gnawing doubt, and loserdom that has plagued it like rust and boll weevils in a rye wheat field ripe for the harvest.
Vancouver heads into the series having left its playoff feeblemindedness in the past with the seventh game, double overtime victory over the Chicago Blackhawks that, moments before Alex Burrows knuckled a slap shot past Chicago Blackhawks goaltender, Cory Crawford, seemed just another doomed effort that would leave local fans writhing in agony like a badly rolled joint in the hands of a high school dropout flogging week old mangoes to overweight hippies and naturopathic medicine majors on Vancouver’s nudist Wreck Beach. But, in a game that the former East Coast Hockey League player nearly single handedly carried for the home team, the Canucks finally put their old lady Mother Bates in the fruit cellar where she belongs. Since then, they have got down to some serious grave digging. The Nashville Predators, done in 6. The San Jose Sharks gone in 5.
Nevertheless, Vancouver fan finds himself gripped by a strange mix of hysterical optimism and crushing fear and trepidation. For a town that plunged into rioting in the streets following its game 7 loss to the New York Rangers in the 1994 final, nothing is more important than winning the Cup this time around and planning a parade that doesn’t involve chasing the local media to the Hooters’ rooftop in a haze of teargas and bitter, unhinged looting. For most fans, closing out this series will be bigger than the Olympic men’s ice hockey victory last year, simply because it will provide the validation that Canada’s paranoid westernmost province craves; yes, a Stanley Cup victory will elevate Vancouver and BC to the rarified glory of being a place in Canada that truly matters, in the way that Montreal and the overwhelming (past) dominance of the Canadiens matter, or Toronto and the 92/93 Jays’ World Series victories matter to the nation. The feelings of doubt and alienation that gnaw at the heart of Canucks’ fan will be but an ugly and receding dream if Luongo, Kesler, Bieksa, and the Sedin twins perform as they have for the better part of this post season. But if they don’t, and Milan Lucic and his Bruins rob them and their fans of the prize, then beware. Beware the fear and bewilderment, the awful gnashing of teeth, the mad rush to Robson St, and the ugly burning sensation reserved only for losers who were expected to win.