Bonjur Hello!
Well, here we are, at the mountaintop of North American sports, a Game 7 to decide a season. This is absolutely the best we can do here. That’s right: Even a Super Bowl, with all its pomp, circumstance and hyped-up capitalist spectacle, can’t match a Game 7, regardless of the matchup. And the reason for that is because we know the Super Bowl is coming. We know it will happen. We plan it. We advertise for it months and sometimes years in advance. Come February, we know we’re going to get the big show, the huge ratings, the chicken wings, the weight gain, the hangover.
But we never know when we’ll get a Game 7 for all the rings. Of course we know there is always an opportunity, but where, when and how takes time to present itself, and sometimes those opportunities just get left in the dust. And if you don’t buy what I’m selling, just think: We haven’t had a Game 7 to decide a championship here in North America since before the pandemic. And that’s been a while, hasn’t it?
So no, we never know when it will come. After all, it was just a few days ago that the Florida Panthers entered the Stanley Cup Finals with a 3-0 lead over the Edmonton Oliers. It was only a matter of time before a drunken Everglades team started throwing the old cup around a rooftop pool during a post-playoff bash somewhere around the southern extremities of the Sunshine State.
Only it didn’t quite happen that way. The Oilers, suffocated by Florida, figured out a way to breathe oxygen back in their final season.
We didn’t see it coming, or at least I didn’t see it coming. That’s because Edmonton, a team that averaged more than 3.5 goals per game this season, a team that saw the best player in the world Connor McDavid, and Leon Draisaitl, one of the best players in the world, combined for 238 regular season points , scored only four goals in the first three games. The Oilers were just smothered by Florida, as were the New York Rangers, who slowly and painstakingly strangled the Panthers out of the playoffs a round earlier.
Then suddenly goals appeared on the ice. Eight in Game 4. Five in Game 5. Then five more in Game 6. Lights went on again and again, and Florida, which had seemed completely unsolvable, whose goaltender, Sergei Bobrovsky, seemed completely unbreakable, suddenly found itself within itself. exactly where they didn’t want to be. Game 7.
But their fate is our joy. We get to follow what is perhaps the most anticipated hockey game of the century.
Only one team has overcome a 3-0 deficit in the Stanley Cup Final, and that was more than 80 years ago: well before helmets, before glass, but just after chicken wire lined the boards. A long time ago, and nowadays it just doesn’t happen anymore. It could be tonight.
Stay with us, more to come!
David will be here soon. In the meantime, here’s Colin Horgan on tonight’s match:
No NHL team has come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a Stanley Cup final since the Toronto Maple Leafs did so against the Detroit Red Wings in April 1942. Now, 82 years later, the Edmonton Oilers can change history. Monday night on the edge of the Everglades, the Oilers will take on the Florida Panthers in Game 7 as they look to win their fourth in a row to capture the Cup and become the first Canadian NHL champions since the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. If goes the Oilers’ way, the game will most likely be crowned one of the NHL’s all-time greatest games – or at least one of the most memorable in the league’s history. And the Oilers captain, a generational talent, will have returned to where his career with the team began.
June 26, 2015 was a Friday and there was a lot of buzz at the BT&T Center in Sunrise, Florida, home (still under a different name) of the Panthers. It was NHL draft night, and the presumed No. 1 pick was an 18-year-old from north Toronto who had supported the Ontario Hockey League for three years and led Canada to a World Junior Championship this past winter. Connor McDavid had played at a different level all his life, was allowed to skate with the nine-year-olds at the age of six and was given ‘exceptional status’ at the age of 15 to go to the OHL, a year earlier, where he played the most decorated player in the league’s history.
The Oilers, on the other hand, had another dismal season. They had finished second to last in the Western Conference. By 2015, the Oilers had become something of a perennial draft joke. The team finished first overall in 2010, 2011 and 2012, seventh overall in 2013, and third overall again in 2013 – each of which was a reflection of Edmonton’s poor performance. No matter how many top draft picks the Oilers added to the roster, they consistently found themselves at or near the bottom of the league. But then there was McDavid. Could he finally be the answer?
“I think my expectations exceed anything anyone else expects of me,” McDavid told the Globe and Mail after the Oilers selected him first overall. “I just have to make sure I play my game. If I meet my expectations, chances are I will meet those of others as well.”
You can read the full story below: