Pure joy.
That's how I'll describe the feeling last night. Absolute, utter, pure unabashed joy. My boys, clad in their jerseys, jumping up and down. My wife wondering loudly, "Did it go in? Did it go in?" The fireworks going off in the neighborhood, the dogs barking. The wide grin on my boy Mike's face.
Joy.
This is why you watch sports, this is why fanatics pour their heart and soul into their teams, why we schedule our lives around it, read about it. It's why we grumble when things go wrong, and why we die just a little when they come so close and disappoint.
It's why we say, "we did it" or "we won" when just about everyone one of us had absolutely nothing to do with the actual game played.
For moments like this.
For really just the second time in my life of 42 years, my die hard fandom has yielded the ultimate reward -- an actual championship for one of the teams I pour so much of my own heart and soul into.
Yes, the Bulls won six titles in the 90s. But I have to be honest. I was every bit the bandwagon jumper with those teams. I would never say that I was a die-hard Bulls fan. Before Michael Jordan came along, I could probably count the number of Bulls games I ever watched on one hand. It was fun to see the Bulls win, but they were never really one of my teams. The Chicago Bears. The Chicago Cubs. The Chicago Blackhawks.
In January 1986, my Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl. As a complete sports idiot, it's one of the marking posts in my life. At that moment, it was the first time one of my teams had won the whole damn thing. I was 17 and it seemed like those Bears would win 3 or 4 more. They didn't.
The Cubs -- well, we aren't going to talk about them today.
The Blackhawks are a team I've followed my whole life. I remember my Grandma Johns, who was most certainly in my thoughts last night, and her having the game on WGN-TV on the big console tv in her living room in Chicago Ridge in the mid 70s, back when Hull and Mikita and Magnuson still roamed the ice in Indian head sweaters.
I remember my dad and my Uncle Art playing furious games of rod hockey between periods on multiple Saturday nights. And my dad telling tales of Bobby and Dennis Hull, and "little Lou Angotti" and Blackhawk triumphs of the past. My dad was never a huge story teller about baseball or football, but hockey was different. It was the one sport where he got excited to tell me about the way things were back when.
I watched great Blackhawks players entire careers here -- Jeremy Roenick, Denis Savard, Doug Wilson, Chris Chelios, Steve Larmer, Tony Amonte, Ed Belfour. I watched great Hawks teams in the mid 80s through the early 90s, teams that kept running into those damn Edmonton Oilers. I watched the great 1992 team win 11 straight playoff games and then lose 4 straight to Pittsburgh. And I watched it all fall apart in the late 90s through to about 3 years ago, when forgettable names like Zhamnov, Mironov, Dychehouse, Daze dominated the scene. When stars like Doug Gilmour and Paul Coffey came to wear the colors about 3 years after their legs had already retired.
So when Kaner's wrister slipped through Leighton's legs and into the net and there was that unreal few seconds where no one besides Kane himself was sure what happened, and then his teammates poured over the boards to celebrate while the Flyers and their fans sat in stunned silence, there was joy. And when Toews lifted that unwieldy, beautifully ornate what used to be silver punch bowl -- themost beautiful trophy in all of sports -- up, there were tears too. For my Grandma. For my dad. And yeah, for me too.
Hopefully my boys won't have to wait the rest of their lives for another. I don't begrudge them the waiting. I hope they're spoiled, I do. And I welcome the bandwagon jumpers. Stay on board folks -- with this team, we're hoping the ride's a long one and we get to do this again and again and again.
The Chicago Blackhawks are Stanley Cup Champions.
Joy NEVER gets old.
