Twenty Years Later ???

If you are a hockey aficionado like me, I highly recommend the Empty Netters Blog on the Post Gazette’s web site. Not only does Seth Rorabaugh do an excellent and thorough job of covering the game, but he also adds a touch of sarcasm and humor which I find to be positively, “Haber-Esqe.”

Throughout the 2010-11 season, Empty Netters has been running a feature entitled “Twenty Years Later” focusing on the 20 year anniversary of the Penguins first Stanley Cup championship. It includes recaps of every game played (often with awesome video footage) and interviews with key players from that team. Most of those players are long gone, with the notable exception of the ageless Marc Recchi. Remember when the Pens traded him in 1992, ostensibly because he was too small to survive long-term in the NHL?

Needless to say, I was thoroughly enjoying the walk down memory lane, until reality slapped me in the face this morning.

TWENTY YEARS ???

Is it really possible that today is the 20 year anniversary of one of the greatest moments in Pittsburgh sports history? Can it really be two decades since that magical season ended with Mario Lemieux lifting the franchise’s improbable first Stanley Cup?

Twenty freakin years?

Let’s see, we were 18 years old, seniors in high school when the Pens won that first championship. That would make me…never mind.

Was it not just yesterday that Mario Lemieux was the 18 year old French Canadian savior of Penguin hockey? No, that was 1984. Did I not wake up this morning to news that 18 year old Czech phenom Jaromir Jagr was coming to Pittsburgh? Sorry, 1990. I could swear that only in the last few minutes came reports that the Pens had acquired Ron Francis and Ulf Samuelsson from Hartford. That was 1991.

And now, Lemieux is the Penguins OWNER, Jagr is playing out the string in Europe and Francis and Samuelsson are both coaches and/or executives in the league. How on earth did this happen?

Here’s the thing; for me and a large portion of my audience, the Penguins are the first championship team we truly experienced. I have the vaguest of memories of the Steelers’ fourth Super Bowl in 1980; just as I have the vaguest of memories of dressing up as “the Fonz” for Halloween. I’ve said before that those first four Super Bowl championships are far more history to me than they are reality.

The Penguins however are different. We quite literally grew up together. It started with the drafting of Lemieux in 1984, the event that quite literally saved the franchise. It continued as Lemieux matured in to a superstar, and then possibly the most dominant player in NHL history. And it morphed in to a championship when the Penguins finally surrounded Le Magnifique with other championship caliber players.

I still remember dancing around my basement when the Pens acquired Paul Coffey in 1987. Finally, there was a second superstar, a player truly worthy of sharing the ice with Big 66. The other star pieces of the championship puzzle fell gradually in to place over the next three plus years; Barrasso, Recchi, Stevens, Jagr, Mullen, Trottier, Murphy, Francis, Samuelson, etc. It was a stunning build out for a club that for too long relied on other team’s leftovers.

I’m not sure today’s generation of Penguin fans can truly appreciate how impossible to fathom a Stanley Cup Championship was for us in 1991. That’s not to say we were not fully on board for the journey, we absolutely were. We just never dared allow ourselves such grandiose fantasies. Not for a team that had won exactly one playoff series in ten years.

For the most part all we knew were near misses and failures. I remember albeit vaguely the 1982 first round loss to the NY Islanders where the Pens blew a 2 goal lead in the final four minutes. I remember quite clearly blowing what should have been a slam dunk playoff appearance in 1988, in spite of Lemieux’s unwavering brilliance down the stretch. And there but for the grace of Steve Guenette go I.

The Penguins made missing the playoffs an annual event; at a time when over 75% of the league was honored annually with a post season bid.

That’s why we celebrated like drunken sailors when the 1991 Pens knocked of Washington in the second round. Going to the conference finals was new ground; a previously inconceivable destination. On a side note, would anyone have guessed then that the series would mark the beginning of two decades of torturing the Craps?

The Penguins had little or no history in those days. Now they have history to match any non original six team (and for my money one or two of them). The watershed moment for the franchise was the Stanley Cup exchange between Sidney Crosby and Lemieux in 2009? That past meets the present. To me having two completely separate eras of championship greatness is what defines a truly great organization, in any sport.

And yet I still can’t believe its been twenty years.

Twenty years since Frankie Pietrangelo’s save against New Jersey. Twenty years since Kevin Stevens guaranteed a victory over Boston after falling behind two games to none? Twenty years since Lemieux effectively destroyed John Casey’s career.

I guess it makes sense. In those days we would watch the games in Chris Cox’s basement and then play hockey in the driveway between periods (with your friendly neighborhood blogger flopping around on the asphalt making “Barrasso-like” saves”). We would celebrate any series victory by grabbing sticks out the garage and running around the block. Today’s game night activities are to say the least, far more reserved.

So much has changed. Lemieux and Jagr gave way to Crosby and Malkin. Barrasso gave way to Marc-Andre Fleury; Phil Bourque gave way to Max Talbot. The Old Igloo has given way to the brilliant new Consol Energy Barn. Mike Lange has given way to Paul Steigerwald (admittedly the one change that we would all reverse in a heartbeat if possible).

And yet so much has stayed the same. Let us not forget that a franchise that endured so much losing and sorrow in its first two decades has lifted the cup three times in the past two decades. The Pens have turned post season success from an impossible dream to an annual expectations. And they have suited up an incredible list of superstars headlined by Lemieux, Jagr, Crosby, and Malkin. Such thoughts were inconceivable in the early 80s, when players were threatened with trades to the Burgh.

In short, a franchise that was once laughed at and mocked is now one of the class organizations in all of sports. Pittsburgh has become a destination spot for great hockey.

Could we have possibly had the foresight in 1991 to see this coming? Certainly not, nor did we care. At that point it was about nothing more than the moment, the incomprehensible idea that, “The Stanley Cup has come to the city of Pittsburgh" to quote Lange.

We had no foresight towards the repeat championship in 1992, nor the shocking collapse of the most dominant team in Penguin’s history two years later. We could not predict Mario’s back, Stevens’ face, Jagr’s moods, or Howard Baldwin’s reckless and unruly spending spree; all of which nearly ruined the team. We had no way of knowing how close our Penguins would come to extinction in the Burgh, before more Mario magic and a fortuitous ping pong ball returned them to prominence.

How could we? We could not even predict our own futures; college, relocations, jobs, wives, kids, and everything else. All of those things that define us today were unknowns 20 years ago. Our lives were blissfully simple back then. We were far more concerned about shutting down Minnesota’s white hot power play, than we were about graduation.

All we knew or cared about was that the impossible had happened; the Pittsburgh Penguins had brought home the Stanley Cup. It was the first time in my life that I truly felt the complete and total sports happiness that comes only with a championship. It was the year I truly became a Penguin fan for life.

Or better stated…twenty years to life.

ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY PENGUIN, BLESSED BE THE PENGUIN, FOR IT IS GOOD.