Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Striking Gold: The Penguins Amazing Run to the 2016 Stanley Cup

Copyright 2016 by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

John Robinson Block, Co-publisher and Editor-in-Chief

David M. Shribman, Executive Editor and Vice-President

Susan L. Smith, Managing Editor

Mila Sanina, Deputy Managing Editor

BOOK EDITORS

Michael Sanserino, Assistant Managing Editor, Sports

Tyler Batiste, Sports Editor

Alex Iniguez, Associate Sports Editor

PHOTO EDITOR

Andrew Rush

ADMINISTRATIVE COORDINATOR

Allison Latcheran, Senior Marketing Manager

Content packaged by Mojo Media, Inc.

Jason Hinman: Creative Director

Joe Funk: Editor

Front and back cover photos by Matt Freed/Post-Gazette

This is an unofficial publication. This book is in no way affiliated with, licensed by or endorsed by the NHL or the Pittsburgh Penguins.

By David Shribman

S ure, weve done this before, and recently. Watched the Steelers march through opponents en route to the Super Bowl. Witnessed the Pirates prevailing in a Wild Card game that was wild beyond expectation, or explanation. Held our breath as the Penguins held onto a lead, and onto a dream. Shoved way too much food in our mouths, mostly from nerves, while the game is on. Burst onto the streets in an ode to joy in black and gold that shook the night. Headed Downtown for the parade a few days later. Heck, we even know the parade route. And remember where we stood in 2009.

But somehow this one was the sweetest yet, or (and who else but Pittsburghers could plausibly make this addendum to the sentence?) at least the sweetest recently.

So this is a meditation on the familiarity of jubilation and the jubilation of familiarity.

No need to remind anyone holding these pages that this is number IV, an estimable record for a club founded in 1967, the year the Maple Leafs of staid old Toronto last won the Stanley Cup. Put it another way: We here in expansion Pittsburgh have won IV more Stanley Cups since the Torontos an original six club with a storied history seasoned with the names Smythe, Mahovlich, Bower, Horton and Sittler last won a single one. In a culture where knowledge of Roman numbers has faded, Pittsburghers have unusual numerical literacy.

But has it occurred to any 15-year-old that it is not exactly normal for someone her age to have rooted for her team in three Super Bowls and three Stanley Cup finals and to have seen her team prevail in four of them? Lots of Stanley Cup finals in Detroit, for example, in the life of that 15-year-old. Three of them. But Super Bowl appearances? None, unless you count Super Bowl XL, which was played in Detroit, but which was won by Pittsburgh. How about our other neighbor, Cleveland? Add up the championship series appearances of all its teams, ever, and you will not need many fingers. No problem fitting rings on thumbs up there on the shores of Lake Erie.

The thing about Pittsburgh and championships is that familiarity has not bred contempt. It has bred jubilation.

That couldnt happen everywhere. Take my first hometown, Boston. We all know that the Red Sox drought lasted 86 years, ending in that remarkable sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2004 World Series. The Sox added another World Series championship three years later, and of course the Patriots added four Super Bowl wins this century. But the Red Sox victory in 2004 drained the team of perhaps its most valuable asset, its maddening human fallibility, and all those terrific Patriots seasons has bred an efficiency that seems at odds with any definition of lovability.

Here, we have fallibility (for many years its local synonym was Pirates) but also lovability. We love our Steelers, we love our Penguins. This championship season was special in the way that all love affairs are special. Both involve high hopes, great obstacles, sometimes a sense of betrayal, always a whiff of danger. But anyone who has experienced small-town girls and soft summer nights, city girls who lived up the stair, or blue-blooded girls of independent means, knows that the memories of hiding from the lights on the village green, or perfumed hair that comes undone, never fully fades, nor does the conviction that, as the Sinatra song prescribes in D-minor, this was a very good year.

Penguins owner Mario Lemieux hoists the Stanley Cup after the Penguins defeated the San Jose Sharks in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final. (Matt Freed/Post-Gazette)

It was a very good year.

It ended with a titanic clash of sporting icons, two of the great teams of any sport, old-fashioned sixes of the grind-it-out tradition, each team destined to be a modifier for the word Nation, always rendered with an uppercase N. We didnt like to think so during some of those sweaty Shark Tank nights, but gradually it became clear: Those Sharks, our colleagues in the animal kingdom as in the kingdom of sporting greats, in fact are our cousins, coming from a town like ours (for many years an afterthought and then a high-tech behemoth), and swiftly developing a folklore like ours, with an ethic like ours, with a fanbase like ours, though with worse uniforms (enough with the Pacific Teal!) and without the colorful local argot nat (spare us the talk of the Next Wave). As summer approaches we may grow to admire these Selachimorpha (for that is the zoological superorder in which they are classified), and for their ability to prevail in the shadow of a superorder sort of city in their own state, a condition not unknown in our precincts.

Lets not forget that this year began in the dregs of the standings, where our local heroes seemed destined to dwell for the length of the season until an inspired change ordered from on high in the management transformed the trolls of the hockey downstairs into the shining upstairs champions of Lord Stanleys loving cup.

Our cup runneth over, again. For this Cup is no demitasse, but verily a bowlin fact, if you will forgive the phrase, a super bowl, especially so since our forces emerged from a fiery trial that held nary a hint that glory might be in the air, or in the offing.

The rest of the story is amply artfully, in fact told in the pages that follow. But what makes this Stanley Cup victory special, or especially sweet, isnt a single play, or a single moment, or a single game. Nor a single figure, for who could choose among Crosby, Malkin, Letang, Lovejoy, Kunitz, Murray and the rookie Rust, who took them to the final in the last breath of a breathless May?

The story here soon to be a legend, but one that is true is the way this team responded to adversity. The most overworked description of the teams of our towne (Im guilty myself, in the very week I write this) is that they possess a work ethic that matches the city in which they play. This is their greatest example, which is why with bows to our predecessor teams, to the Chief and the Steel Curtain; to Pronovost and Aps and Schock; to Stargell and Clemente and Wagner and both Waners; to Mean Joe and Bradshaw and Swann; to Lemieux and Barrasso and Coffey and company; to the Immaculate Reception and Mazeroskis blast this may be our greatest hour. Close to last and then firmly in first, and always first in our hearts, the Penguins are champs again. But champions unlike any other, and not only because they are ours.