This is the second post in what will be a series on this blog. In the series I highlight my “worst fears” that might happen while I traverse the Appalachian Trail. In my first entry I talked about my fear of alpha-gal syndrome and went into some depth about how his series will go. You don’t have to read that entry before this one, but if you do it helps my metrics.
The Stanley Cup finals begin today. Congratulations to the Carolina Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights, who won their respective conferences and will compete for the most famous piece of hardware in North American sports. My worst fear is that next year the winner will be the Boston Bruins.
At this point, I should mention that I am a big Bruins fan. I’m wearing my David Krejčí jersey as I type this. I wasn’t always a Bruins fan. I followed the NBA and college basketball as a kid and only really watched hockey during the Stanley Cup finals. I never quite learned all the different weird names of all the divisions and conferences. The Adams and the Norris winners play for the Wales trophy or some shit? Once I moved to Massachusetts for college I became much more invested in the NHL and college hockey. Going to a Beanpot is a New England rite of passage.
Since I never really followed a team as a youngster, I kind of picked up the Bruins as my team. This lasted until 1997 when the Hartford Whalers decamped and moved to Raleigh, becoming the Carolina Hurricanes. I am from North Carolina and felt like I owed it to the team that came to the state of my birth to pledge my allegiance. Despite still living in the Boston area, I threw my support behind the Canes. I bought a shirt and a hat and everything. The only problem was that I never really watched the Canes or followed the team because 90% of the hockey I consumed was on NESN. Nevertheless, I told myself and my friends that I was a Canes fan; even as I watched Bruins games multiple times a week.
This charade went on for almost a decade. I finally came to my senses on the night of June 19, 2006. That night the Hurricanes defeated the Edmonton Oilers 3-1 in game 7 to capture the Stanley Cup. The first and still only major professional sports title won by a team from North Carolina. And while the players were parading the Stanley Cup around the ice I felt nothing. I felt no real pride or satisfaction. I just kind of felt, “oh well, good for those guys”. That was when I realized that if I could not get excited for the team after winning the title in game 7 I was never going to. So the next season I finally admitted that I was a Bruins fan and started to act like it. I bought a shirt and a hat and everything.
Being a Bruins fan during that period was tough sledding. They didn’t make the playoffs in 2007 and barely made it in 2008, before losing in the first round. The 2009 team finished only one point away from the President’s Trophy before losing in seven games to the Hurricanes. 2010 was the year everything was going to be different. The year all those “we want it as much as you do” banners all over North Station were supposed to finally mean something. That was until the Flyers playoff series.
One day I’ll be able to see or hear the name Scott Hartnell without weeping like a small girl, but I have not yet reached that point. In the second round in 2010 Boston took a 3-0 lead on Philly in the best-of-7 series. Through bad play, bad luck, and general bad vibes they blew that entire lead and had to play a seventh and decisive game at home. I happened to have drill that weekend at Fort Devens, but we got barracks and the barracks had cable so after a day on the range everyone could catch hot chow and a hot shower before settling in for the game.
The game started as promisingly as possible and the Bruins opened a 3-0 lead in the first period. Milan Lucic scored twice. The day room in the barracks was jumping and everything was right with the world. The Flyers outplayed Boston from that point forward and by the middle of the third period it was 3-3. Then Boston took the worst “too many men on the ice” penalty since 1979 and allowed a power play goal to Simon Gagne that proved to be the series winner. The day room in the barracks was a mausoleum and the world deserved to burn to the ground. Hartnell had two points in the clincher and finished the series with 5 points and a +3 rating. The numbers themselves don’t paint the full picture of just how much of an annoying shit Hartnell could be over seven games.
So going into 2010-2011 the team was still wearing that frustration, but won the division behind captain Zdeno Chara’s league leading +33 rating and Vezina winner Tim Thomas in goal. They exorcised some demons by beating the Flyers on their way to the Eastern Conference title. That led to a Stanley Cup matchup with the Vancouver Canucks in June.
Being an Army Reservist meant there were lots of sacrifices you needed to make. One of which was that they sucked two weeks of every summer away for Annual Training. Of course in 2011 the Annual Training was in Fort Stewart in Georgia. Also of course, it was during the exact same time as the Stanley Cup. Unlike the aforementioned drill at Fort Devens, this training exercise was a full-on field problem. They took multiple different units from all over the eastern seaboard and dropped us onto a training area with GP larges and mediums as far as the eye could see. No creature comforts. There was barely any cellular service and even fewer locations to keep a civilian computer or wireless phone charged. We were only able to get the scores of each game the morning after when somebody made a run to the DFAC and grabbed hot chow for breakfast.
And by the way, in case you’ve never had the privilege, Fort Stewart in the summer is hotter than the Fonz is cool. Satan probably does his Annual Training drills for the demons in hell there. I’ve lived in Las Vegas and Austin. I’ve worked in the Mojave Desert and Caribbean jungles in the summer. Fort Stewart is far more miserable. Imagine the most humid place you’ve ever been in your life and then add 50% humidity to it while also well into the high 90’s the entire time the sun is out. Our wet bulbs told us it was heat category 5 every second from about an hour after sunrise to an hour after sunset. We spent at least half of everyday being prevented from training and just sitting in our tents sweating our balls off sucking down as much water as our buffalo could hold. In short the whole thing was horrid, and never knowing what was going on in the Cup Final was the coup de grâce.
Boston and Vancouver punched and counter-punched through six games and got set for a winner-take-all game 7 on June 15th. This also happened to be the last day of our actual training so the leadership let those of us who wanted take a GSA (minivan) and go to a bar on post to watch the game in civilian clothes. We were forbade from drinking and had to come back as soon as the game ended, but at least it was some kind of reward for a grueling exercise. There were reports of bad weather coming in that night, so we were told to be mindful that if the skies went sideways they would recall us. Of course, the skies went sideways.
Shortly into the second period, with the Bruins up 1-0, we got the call to leave the bar and cheese it back to the training area. We drove back through a pretty significant rainstorm. What we saw when we got back was crazy, though.
A microburst had come down right in the middle of our AO. Radio antennae knocked over, tents toppled everywhere, soldiers standing around in various different uniforms fumbling in the dark trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone briefly gathered whatever they had within arm’s reach and walked over to the Reserve Center about three blocks away.
The Reserve Center was in no way built to provide shelter for all of the soldiers from this exercise. We all had to stand basically nuts to butts in the basement waiting for the “all clear” in case any further storms came in. In my civilian clothes, I was so much more fortunate than those were in the training area when the microburst happened. Everyone was just dressed in whatever they had when the worst of it started. There were people in brown T-shirts and PT pants. ACU jacket and PT shorts with boots. One poor woman had on just a PT shirt and a towel wrapped around her. I guess she was in the middle of a shower at the worst possible time.
As we all stood there hot and cramped and cranky and miserable, some kind soul was able to get a radio feed of the game over the internet. So I listened to a staticky radio call of the final six minutes of game 7 as Tim Thomas closed out a 4-0 shutout of the Canucks. After the game ended we all stood there for about an hour until they bussed us to some auditorium somewhere or another. We sat in the auditorium until they procured us some barracks to use for the night.
The next morning we all went back to ground zero and fixed up the tents, collected our things, and got everything ready to tear down. Fortunately, since all of the tents fell straight down most people’s gear stayed right where it was left. A few people lost a few things that had to go down as “field losses” but nothing major like a sensitive item or anything. After packing up our area and spending one more night in the barracks we left on a jet plane back to Boston just in time for the victory parade.
So basically I missed the 2011 Stanley Cup and did not get to experience it the way I would have liked. Boston went back to the Cup final in 2013 and 2019 but lost both. And the less said about the 2022-2023 season, the better.
I figure at my age I’ll be lucky enough to see one or maybe two more Bruins championships before I die. Considering what happened in 2011, my worst fear is for them to win in 2027 and I wouldn’t be able to watch or enjoy any of the action.
Marco Sturm, if you are listening, do well next year. Make the playoffs and even win a round. Bonus points if you knock out Toronto again. But save the deep postseason runs for 2028 and beyond.
Gene Hikes the Appalachian Trail 