This was written by Sophie, one of our summer interns. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.
There are still four hours and eleven minutes before the puck drops in TD Garden for Game Seven of the Stanley Cup. But in some ways this game has been brewing for a year, maybe even my entire life.
Last August, I packed a couple of suitcases, boarded a plane, and moved into a dorm room at Boston College, 1,210 miles away from home. Bye, bye small talk, Imo’s pizza, and bread sliced bagels. Hello Joe Kennedy, Dunkin Donuts, and victory parades.
I’ve lived in St. Louis my entire life, growing up on Cardinals baseball, toasted ravioli, and the Arch. St. Louis is my home. I have a massive STL flag in my dorm room, along with a photo of the skyline. Within a week of being in Boston my roommate was already making fun of me for talking about St. Louis so much. The first time I flew back from Boston the sight of the green roofs and Arch brought me to tears.
Because I was so attached to St. Louis, it was a challenge to adjust to Boston. I loved Boston’s history (John Adams and Robert Kennedy), the functional public transportation system, and the way the city always seemed to be bustling. But I couldn’t quite adjust to the East Coast mentality of all business, all the time. There was nothing of St. Louis in the city I had chosen to live in for the next few years. Over time it would get easier as I learned how to navigate the East Coast, but Boston would never quite feel like home.
I also couldn’t adjust to being surrounded by New England sports fans. Gone were the St. Louis Cardinals shirts, anti-Stan Kroenke sentiment, and Blues hopefulness that maybe we could do something this season. I would sit through two different Boston victory parades in my eight months up there, observing Boston fans up close and personal.
The difference between St. Louis and Boston fans comes down to one word: euphoria (which rhymes with Gloria, so it’s fitting.) This year alone Boston had two victory parades, one for the Boston Red Sox and the other for the New England Patriots. Since 2004, Boston has celebrated a championship win 12 times (five for the Patriots, four for the Red Sox, two for the Bruins, and one for the Celtics.) To compare, excluding the Blues Stanley Cup win, St. Louis has celebrated two championship wins: the 2006 and 2011 World Series.
Which means that when St. Louis faced Boston in the Stanley Cup, Boston expected another parade. The Boston Bruins were Stanley Cup champions before the puck dropped for Game One. After all, according to one radio announcer “what was St. Louis going to do? Play harder? Play smarter? It’s over. Bruins in four.” My roommate, a Massachusetts native, told me that her brother had been planning for the parade since he found out that the Bruins were advancing to the Finals. It was expected; they beat the Hurricanes in four games, destiny was calling and a new Bruins team was about to have their name etched on the Stanley Cup.
Meanwhile St. Louis played the Blues anthem, “Gloria” by Laura Branigan, for 24 hours on radio station Y98.1 while the city celebrated an improbable and near impossible victory. All we had to do was win one game and we would finally have our first Stanley Cup win in franchise history. Fans had waited their entire lives for this moment. All we wanted was a win, but most didn’t even expect that.
To get all philosophical in a sports article, Boston sports fans are the Übermensch, St. Louis sports fans are Knights of Faith. The Boston Bruins step onto the ice as legends, the St. Louis Blues step onto the ice as underdogs no matter the opponents.
Boston expects to win. They are a town of Tom Bradys, Andrew Benintendis, and Zdeno Charas. Achieving a victory is the DNA of Boston sports teams. They don’t lose. Ever. In fact, if you try and complain about the myriad of cheating scandals, Boston fans will reply that “you’re just mad because we win all the time.” (Which, yeah, Boston does win all the time, but that doesn’t dismiss the cheating allegations.) Boston teams are the Nietzsche superman, they are mandated to win the second they make it to a championship game, the city demands it of them.
Meanwhile, St. Louis fans both expect the Blues to win and, at the same moment, expect them to lose. When I called my dad to celebrate the Blues clinching the playoffs, he just said, “We don’t do well against Winnipeg. But who knows, maybe this year.” I repeated the same thing to my roommate’s dad for the Dallas Stars series, “We always lose to Dallas.” I hoped I was wrong, but I had been a Blues fan for 19 years; just like my dad I assumed I might not see a Stanley Cup win in my lifetime. Just another casualty of bleeding blue. Just like Kierkegaard’s Knights of Faith, Blues fans believe in the paradox of winning and losing at the same time.
Which means that when all is said and done, Boston is entitled and St. Louis is joyous. The difference can be summed up in the fact that Boston booed the Blues players, threw trash on the ice (which, admittedly St. Louis did too after Game Six), and called St. Louis a dirty team with trash fans. After Game Five, Bruins fans got in a fight in the stands, throwing beer on each other and pummeling each other down four rows of seats. Fans couldn’t seem to believe that their Bruins weren’t following the script the city had given them.
St. Louis on the other hand also threw trash onto the ice rink, but they also sold out the Enterprise center for away games, hosted fans at Busch Stadium for Game Seven, played Gloria for hours, and cheered for Laila Anderson, the girl who overcame an autoimmune disease to become the rallying point for the Blues. My St. Louis Blues went from worst to first and took a whole city with them. College students tuned in to radio broadcasts, NHL livestreams, and television sets. Longtime fans tried to keep from getting excited because they had been around before, they knew just how easy it was for the St. Louis Blues to lose a Stanley Cup. A St. Louis immigrant watched his first ever hockey game, came back, asked about the rules, and sprinted out of class during Game Seven because “it’s history!”
Boston will forget about this Stanley Cup because they can. They’ve won before, they’ll win again, and they have three other teams and two victory parades this year to celebrate. Sure, there were tears on the part of the players and fans, but that was because the expected outcome didn’t come true. Someone had flipped the movie script and forgot to tell Boston. Guess they will have to wait a little more than four months to have yet another victory parade.
They didn’t celebrate how far the team had come, instead harping on the fact that the Blues were a dirty team due to the two suspensions given to Blues players during the series. Most Bruins fans were in shock at the end of the game, expecting a victory up until the final buzzer. After all, in just this series Boston came back from a two goal deficit. When the game was over, Boston fans trickled out and immediately switched their focus to the Red Sox. Time to forget just how far their hockey team had made it. There would be no joyful celebration of a fantastic year.
St. Louis will never forget this, their first Stanley Cup, because of the absolute JOY of this history making championship. When that buzzer hit 0.0 and the boys mobbed each other down by their goal, St. Louis erupted in pure joy. The storyline ended in victory for the first time in a 52-year history and what a storyline it was: last in the league, fighting each other at practice, bringing in a rookie goalie, adoring Laila Anderson, making losing home games an art form, missing empty net goals, enduring penalties and hand passes, idolizing a hometown hero, and winning Game Seven, bringing a city together for one night and, now, one parade. There was magic in our first Stanley Cup victory. Magic that will live on in the next generation of hockey fans who will grow up pretending to be Pat Maroon, Colton Parayko, and Alex Pietrangelo.
I can’t wait to wear my Stanley Cup t-shirt up at Boston College.
