As fans woke up with a Stanley Cup hangover on Thursday morning, they were undoubtedly filled with memories of games and players past. Not just the members of this once-in-a-generation team that ended a 39-year championship drought, but the players who wore the Black and Gold long ago.
Players like Bobby Orr, Derek Sanderson and Gerry Cheevers — the legends who made hockey the city’s most revered sport in the early 1970s.
Players like Cam Neely and Don Sweeney, who spent long years in Boston on teams that came oh-so close to winning it all.
Players like Ray Bourque, who gave their professional lives to the franchise and had to go elsewhere to win it all.
This championship, like the 2004 Red Sox World Series title, is for long-suffering fans who thought this day might never come in their lifetimes. It's for everyone who bleeds black and gold. It’s for fans and players who love the game and who still get pumped up when they hear The Nutrocker.
It’s also for the fans that stood by the team through its darkest years. I was there for many of them. From 1997-2004 I hosted Boston Bruins games on NESN. In that seven-year span, the B’s made the playoffs five times, losing in the first round in four of them. Their only trip to the second round was their 1999 Eastern Conference semifinal loss to the Buffalo Sabres.
They were lean years indeed. Now, with the city captivated by this incredible run of Game 7 victories, it’s hard to remember how far things have come since those days.
Hard-core Bruins fans remember. They remember Axelsson, who played 797 games with the B’s from 1997 to 2009. They remember that Jason Allison was the team’s captain after Bourque left for Colorado. They remember names like Tim Taylor, Sean Bates, Kyle McLaren, Antti Laaksonen and Byron Dafoe.
True Bruins fans remember those players because they stood by their team through it all, bleeding black and gold every step of the way. Watching every shift. They loved the fact that Boston became Title Town, they joined in the other celebrations, but they continued to yearn for the day when their beloved Broooons could join in on the fun.
On Thursday morning, they remember all those games of the past. They remember nights like Jan. 19, 2002. For the vast majority of New England sports fans, that is known as the night Tom Brady and the Patriots beat the Oakland Raiders in a snowy AFC divisional playoff game at Foxboro. They remember switching over to that game just in time to see the Tuck Rule invoked. That play happened just a few minutes after Keith Tkachuk beat Dafoe in overtime in St. Louis.
That night, I watched the Tuck Rule call in the control room at NESN minutes after wrapping up the Bruins postgame show. Along with a group of hockey-loving producers and editors, we crammed around a small TV and tried to figure out if Brady fumbled or not.
Now, with the Bruins back on top, these are all happy memories. They are battle scars — the pre-payment made by fans to earn this day in the sun.
Today, there are plenty of newcomers to Bruins Country, and that’s a good thing. I’m not someone who thinks the pink-hat wearing crowd takes away from a franchise. The more, the merrier — everyone is welcome along for the ride. Sports radio stations are talking hockey — something that never happened in the seven years I was doing the B’s. Not unless Marty McSorely did something stupid on the ice, that is.
This is a championship to be shared by everyone. It’s a Stanley Cup run with storylines that would make the most casual sports fan stand up and cheer. It’s a championship for all of New England, for the hundreds of thousands of people who will gather in Boston on Saturday afternoon to watch Zdeno Chara, Tim Thomas and the rest of the Bruins get a long-awaited ride on the Duck Boats.
It will be an emotional day. Even more emotional for 9,491 dyed-in-the-wool Bruins fans. That was how many people gathered at the FleetCenter on Halloween night in 2002 to watch Paul Kariya score a hat trick as the Bruins lost to the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim 4-1. It was the smallest non-blizzard crowd to ever see a regular season B's game.
After the game, unknown goalie Tim Thomas was sent down to the AHL affiliate in Providence.
Things have changed a lot since then, haven't they? But those of you who were there, part of the smallest crowd to ever see a game in that building, haven’t changed one bit. I know, because I was there with you that night, and I've been with you every step of the way. You stood by your team then, and you’re standing on top of the world today.
