dream season

dream season

In about three hours the Calgary Flames will take on the Tampa Bay Lightning in game four of the Stanley Cup finals. tick tick tick only a few hours until the crazy time begins.

Now, this is a city that knows how to party. We do it every year for ten days in July for the Stampede, and they did it before I came here, throwing a heckuva party for the 88 Olympics.

But this, this is altogether different. This city really identifies with this team, in a way that would be unthinkable only a couple of years ago.

A lot of things have come together this year to make this a successful season - which before this year would have simply meant making the playoffs. Coach Brian Sutter (who is from the same town I was born in, Viking Alberta) insist on hard work from his players, and shows them how to do it.

To be sure, Jarome Iginla has shown fantastic leadership this year, and the goaltending has been tremendous - not just Mikka Kiprusov, but also Roman Turek when he is needed. But a hot goalie and a superstar player in the mould of Gordie Howe or Mark Messier isn't enough to win the Stanley Cup - lots of teams with those kinds of qualifications don't get past the first round.

There is an element that has to be present on any championship team: it must be a total team effort. And that doesn't mean leaning on your goalie or star player to get it done for you, it means working that extra bit harder so that you don't let the guy beside you down - and knowing that he is doing the same thing.

But Calgary has been a hardworking bunch of hockey players for years now. They have had good coaches, they have had some fan support. But the party after winning the first round against Vancouver, that showed that something was different this year, for the fans as well. This is their team this year, too.

So what has changed? what is the key element that has been missing for so many years, both in terms of team production and fan support?

In short, an ugly green hardhat.

One of the acquisitions this year (can't remember who but I think we got him from St. Louis) brought with him a tradition of awarding a hardhat to the hardest-working player on any given game. The players looked around the Saddledome, but all they could find to fit the bill was an old battered green hardhat left over from some construction. The players started awarding the hat early in the season.

They might have been doing it for each other, to motivate each other to work harder, and that's fine as far as that goes. However, that hard hat struck a chord with the fans; that gesture of making the reward be a mundane item, a tool that symbolized hard work, spoke to construction workers and roughnecks and truckers, to the guys who lay the asphalt and the guys who herd the cattle. It was the Flames saying "we look up to you, to the guys who do the really hard work".

All of a sudden, the team didn't belong to the guys in the corporate luxury boxes, to the guys who got free tickets through their company and sat on their hands. Instead, we owned the team, us, the average blue collar grunts who make a city go. It was our team. And it still is. Right now, we're Canada's team.

Yeah baby. Go Flames Go.