Since it's playoff time, I wanted to share this essay. For fans of the game it touches upon what it is to play for the Cup. For those who don't know the game it gives you a glimpse of what it is like to play playoff hockey.
http://www.hockeybuzz.com/blog.php?post_id=14656
By Frank Brown
Somewhere there's a grave I should visit. The headstone probably is
powder by now; certainly the person buried under it is. I owe this
person millions - a debt of thanks for crafting, in all its
spectacularly simple splendor, the gleaming silver bucket that became
Lord Stanley's Cup. In the absence of a bouquet (can there be enough
roses to offer gratitude this profound?), in the absence of a factual
sense of whether this artisan lived as a man or a woman, in the absence
of a clue where this important soul lived, laughed, learned, ate,
drank, slept, wept, worried, suffered, and died, these humble words of
appreciation are, at once, the least I can do and the best I can do.
Good Sir or Madam, wherever you are, wherever you were, thank you for
the Cup that makes hockey better than any other sport. Men will work
all their lives for the privilege of crying over the Cup. They will cry
because they won it, they will cry because they didn't. They will spend
ten days or two weeks clubbing each other silly, will break each
other's bones, will rend each other's flesh, will shed each other's
blood (or their own; it couldn't matter less). And still they will
shake hands when the series is over because over that period of time
they shared, on a frozen field of combat, the gallant honor of striving
for the Cup.
The winners will bring it to their parents' homes and say, with words
or with smiles, the same words just typed here: Thank you. Thanks, Mom
and Dad. Thanks for driving me to the rink. Thanks for the skates at
Christmas. Thanks for the goal net in the driveway. Thanks for
shivering through all those practices. Thanks for everything. Mom, Dad,
when this Cup goes to the engraver, your hands will hold the chisel and
the hammer as the name you gave me-YOUR name-is immortalized.
Others will speak to parents now gone, to brothers or sisters or
friends who didn't live to see the day the dream came true. They will
close their eyes and speak with their hearts. From their floats on
parade day, they will search the skies for a cloud that looks like
someone in Heaven who truly would have loved to have been there.
Our Cup is for Howe and Richard and Beliveau and Gretzky. And it is for
Holik or Lehtinen or Zubov or Leetch. Canadians can win it. Americans
can win it. Or Czech Republicans or Russians or Slovaks or Finns or
Swedes. It isn't merely a Cup; it is a wondrous melting pot. And the
democracy is a marvel. Everybody who helped win it gets to touch it, to
carry it above his head, even hold it in the lap of his wheelchair. The
scorers who checked, the checkers who scored, the muckers who passed,
the passers who mucked, the fighters who held their tempers and skated
away from trouble, they touch sweaty fingers to the cold sterling
silver and suddenly all the pain leaves them - flies upward with the
spirits of the fans who buy the tickets and the T-shirts and the
banners and the posters, the ones who paint their faces and wear their
jerseys to the rink for the games in May that matter and the games in
September that don't.
It is incredible what they put themselves through-the players, the
fans, the coaches who would sign any deal with any devil if it
guaranteed the last line change, the best match-up, another skate save
in overtime of Game 7. And then again, it is not incredible at all. You
stand in a rink and you see the faithful wave their towels or their
shakers, you hear the choir of their voices in a temple of all that is
pure about our game, and you know there is no place else to be. You
know there are sixteen teams, then eight, then four, then two, then
one, and when that one team is yours, all the energy in the universe
channels through Stanley into your cells, your molecules, your atoms.
And forgive me, if the bowl was a little smaller or a little taller or
a little wider, it wouldn't be the Cup of our fathers and our
forefathers, the Cup Bower won at forty-two, the Cup Baun won on a
broken ankle, the one Pocket Rocket raised eleven times in twenty
seasons. It might be some soaped up candy dish, but it wouldn't be
Stanley, which some nameless, long-dead silversmith crafted into hockey
perfection just over one hundred years ago.
Our gratitude is beyond measure.