Well, Damn. I certainley didn't plan on taking a week to follow up the Stanley piece, but forces beyond my control i was proven rather powerless once again.
The stories in the, "wierd ," pile of Stanley are too many to list. Let's just say when you give an ice hockey player 24 hours to do whatever he wants with the sports greatest trophy it gets wild. One ammendmant to my my prior story, While researching I found out that teams engraved on the cup are confined to the last 64 years. Instead of adding another ring to the base of the cup, they are infact replaced with a fresh ring and the latter retired to ice hockey hall of fame. Makes sense. I always wondered how they planned on handling the cup if it grew to 7 feet tall.
One thing I think is overlooked far too often is the fact that the Stanley Cup is the hardest trophy in all of professional sports to win. The N.H.L is the only sport where you must survive 4 rounds of best of a 7 playoff series. That's a possible 28 games a team could play to claim the cup. In contrast the N.F.L requires a maximum of 4 wins and you can get a 1st round buy that would drop that to 3. While the physics and dynamics surrounding the sports make them very different, I don't think you'll find many people who would argue that hockey is easier on the body than football.
The N.H.L symphony builds to it's crescendo and all out here in the audience hold our collective breath's waiting for a champion to emrege. Even now in June, we the die hard hockey fan, dream of clean sheets of ice. Empty ice rinks at 5 a.m., dressing in a locker room where temp never reaches above 10 degrees. Though some of us have had are better day's pass by, we still look to Cup as a somehow attainable prize of immortallity. Though my name will never grace the base of Lord Stanley, seeing Mario's, Evengini's, Coffee's, Crosby ect.. still brings us in contact with timeless-ness of competition for hocke's greatest prise
