Detroit's Stanley Cup runneth over

blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport > Ian Winwood | June 5, 2008 1:17 PM

The Red Wings' pace and intensity made them worthy winners, and provided a great advertisement for hockey

I think it was on Tuesday morning when I realised that the National Hockey League had really captured my attention, and that the spectacle on ice was becoming a classic. It might have been something to do with the fact that here in London the sun had come up and I hadn't really noticed, so absorbed was I with the game of high-chess-with-violence that was being played 4,000 miles and six times zones away in Detroit. The Red Wings were just 34.3 seconds away from claiming their fourth Stanley Cup in 11 years in game five of the finals - but they eventually lost in the third period of overtime, almost a full game of hockey later.

This five hour match may have only served to delay the inevitable - Detroit claimed the Stanley Cup with a 3-2 game six victory in Pittsburgh last night - but as an advertisement for hockey, Monday-night-cum-Tuesday morning will take some beating. I remember watching the players on the ice and thinking, 'God, they must be knackered.' I felt this was a fairly safe bet; I was knackered and I was only watching it on the telly.

Speaking of which, buoyed by good television ratings (5.8 million in the US, much better than most years) the hockey itself was beginning to resemble the kind of carnival of skill and lunacy that leaves the viewer involuntarily open-mouthed. This was ballet with broken noses and 'concussion-like symptoms'. For the moment at least, the drone of received wisdom that states that this sport is not popular and is in fact responsible for everything wrong with the world was silenced. Of course, the series would have ideally gone to a deciding seventh game, but don't let that obscure the fact that this has been the best Stanley Cup Finals in years.

Not that that means a damn thing to the team that lost. Can you imagine, can you even try and imagine, how the playing staff of the Pittsburgh Penguins must feel this morning? All that... for nothing. At the outset of game five, the TV commentators said something to the effect that the Pennsylvanian club had "nothing to lose". Nonsense, they had the Cup to lose, and that one thing is everything. This morning the Pittsburgh Penguins are the same as the 28 other NHL teams that failed in the only thing they're required to do, only this team came closer than most. Falling just two victories shy of their quarry is a fate as mean as a snake.

But there you have it, hard water. The 102 competitive games the Penguins played this year count for exactly nothing; for what it's worth, they may as well be the Los Angeles Kings. This awful, unvarnished truth will this morning be staring 42-year-old Gary Roberts in the face as he shaves off his playoff beard. If you want to gauge the kind of toll professional hockey takes on its participants you should look to the players' faces, all scars and creases and noses that look as if they were fashioned by Picasso. Roberts looks like Sean Connery's dad. This morning, you can bet he feels like it too.

In years to come people will frown and pause in order that they remember the name of the team the Detroit Red Wings faced in this year's finals. Mere minutes after the 2008 NHL season came to a close, though, it's easy to recall the many exhilarating moments of this thrilling series. Watching at home, I've said "ah" and "oh" so many times it sounds like I'm faking an orgasm. I was at it all the way through game three (which I believed to be the best match I'd ever seen) and I was at it all the way through game five as well (which turned out to be even better). I even made notes. They read, simply: 'And basketball is more popular than hockey, why?'

But those Red Wings... what can you do? Pittsburgh did not lose the Stanley Cup, the Wings won it. The team are as frightening as The Motor City itself, and that's plenty frightening; sharing a sheet of ice with them would make any sensible person run for their lives. They are a machine, one that proves that hockey is a team game and that the best teams are those that comprise a collective greater than the sum of its parts. A 19-headed monster, the Red Wings did everything right, and did it at a pace and with an intensity that was exhausting even to watch, let alone face. I'm surprised that Pittsburgh coach Michel Therrien didn't lean over the glass dividing him from his opposite number, Mike Babcock, and ask, "please, can we not have a minute's peace? My lads here need to have a cry."

The Penguins must also be cross-checking themselves that it took them two full hours of hockey to realise that they were in the Stanley Cup Finals. Detroit knew this from the first shift of game one and acknowledged the fact by scoring seven unanswered goals and winning two of the four games required. By this point the job was mathematically half done; psychologically, it seemed much more than that. For more than a week now, really, the writing's been on the cup.

Or so it seemed to me, and to you as well I'm sure. But then came Monday night, sudden-death overtime, five hours of hockey, and a heart attack roughly every minute and a half for hockey fans in two major American cities. Sainsbury's was open by the time I got to bed, and still I couldn't sleep; I wanted the new season to start even though the old one had yet to finish. Talk about peaking at the right time.

And now it's over. Some have described the Red Wings' advantage in this series as being one of experience (Detroit, 'today's team', vs. Pittsburgh, 'tomorrow's team') but I'm not so sure; to me it looked more like appetite. That's not to suggest that the Penguins lacked hunger, just that Detroit (for the most part) had more of it, and knew how to better use it. The Pens weren't outplayed, they were merely outfought. All series long Detroit prevented them from doing the things they knew how to do, and no amount of overtime could disguise the fact that there wasn't a thing they could do about it.

As I type this last paragraph, the sun is once again rising over London. A continent away, it has just set over a fabulous Stanley Cup Finals and a season in general that has had much to recommend it. The NHL has done a good job, the Red Wings have done a great one. The Cup is theirs, as is the summer. Being hockey players, though, they'll shrug this off and claim that all that pain and glory was nothing more than a night's work.