St. Louis Blues Stanley Cup Brings Out The Thanks And Memories

Normally we reserve our thankful time for the last Thursday in November (or sometime in October in Canada). The St. Louis Blues have us all feeling very thankful right now.

The St. Louis Blues are just a hockey team to some. They are just another group of pro athletes making more money than any of us will dream of in our lifetimes in one year.

Despite the disparity in incomes, hockey players, especially members of the Blues seem more connected to the fans and their community than perhaps any other sport. Fans of other sports might argue that, but hockey seems to bring out a different kind of connection.

All sports like to talk about the fans, but hockey players seem to genuinely feel the plight of those that pay hard earned money to come watch them ply their trade. Thus, they are usually thankful for all the love and support they get during a year.

The thanks were overflowing for the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues. By bringing the Stanley Cup to St. Louis, they have fulfilled so many dreams that it might be as impossible to count them as it is the stars in the sky.

Each player is thankful for the Cup by reaching a lifelong goal. They almost always grow reminiscent, thanking their parents for all the early morning practices and sometimes setting aside their own lives to make sure their hockey dreams took precedence.

Coaches up and down the road get thanked. Fans get thanked for all the support given during any year.

Fans thank players for all their hard work. They thank them for finally buying in and giving a full 60 and all sorts of cliches.

But, it is not just the players that fans thank when it comes to something as emotional as winning the Stanley Cup has proven to be for most Blues fans. We suddenly remember all the way back to when we first fell in love with this team and all the things that happened to cement our fandom along the way.

As far as my own fandom is concerned, I have to thank my family. They all played a huge part in my love for this franchise.

Neither my father nor mother were born in St. Louis. Despite their transplant nature, they became true St. Louisans through the Blues.

My dad took my mom to her first NHL game in 1967 and they both fell in love and fell in love with the team at the same time. Oddly enough, I would end up taking my wife to her first NHL game as well.

I have to thank my parents for taking a shy kid to Blues games despite an incident at a WWF show where I whined too much about the crowd noise. As much as I loved wrestling, hockey was just different and the noise never bothered me.

Even as a kid, I loved the atmosphere of the old Arena. It was dark and sometimes sticky, but it had its own charm. I remember staying late enough one time to see the cats roaming inside while I clutched my Curtis Joseph poster and talked to my dad.

I have to thank my brother for keeping me into the Blues and also playing a hand in wanting to become a hockey broadcaster. He would be watching Blues games on the living room TV and I would pretend to be Brett Hull with a kid’s plastic golf club and an empty Bubble Tape container in the hallway. I could always tell how the team was doing by the voice of Ken Wilson, who was everything I wanted to be as an announcer. He would make a non-conference game in December as exciting as a playoff game.

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I have to thank my mom. It seemed like whenever I was in need of a new Blues shirt or whatever, she would be there to get it, whether for birthdays or Christmas or just whenever. I still remember her coming into my middle-school lunch room to tell me the Blues had traded for Wayne Gretzky and to ask if I wanted a jersey. Of course, I said yes and there it was waiting for me when I got home.

That might still be the most pristine jersey I own. That does not have anything to do with him leaving so soon either.

My extended family also deserves thanks. Being from Chicago, they were all Blackhawks fans. However, there was never anything more than good-natured ribbing here or there. Funny enough, the only thing even remotely mean spirited between us was teaching my baby cousin to say “Let’s Go Blues” for my aunt and uncle.

But when it came to the games themselves, we all had space. Some families can rip one another and be ok, but our family knew the pain of the other when their team lost. So, though it pained us to do so, we all felt good for the other when our teams finally won.

My friends deserve thanks as well. Whether we could afford to play organized hockey or not, we all came together to play ball hockey or street hockey, most of the time with someone wearing a Blues jersey.

That same group of friends, minus one who was in Florida, convinced each other to go to Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final. The cost was pretty high, but it was an experience we are not likely to forget, even though the team stunk it up that night.

That is the funny thing about sports though. While we all take it too seriously at times, the reality is that sports and the teams we love actually help us mark the times.

I remember going to a Blues-Blackhawks game when my brother was in high school. It was pretty special that just the two of us got to go, even though I hated those seats in his old car at the time.

There were fights between Blues and Chicago fans in the concourse, which should have been scary at the time, but were fascinating instead. I remember those old, smelly troughs in the men’s bathroom, which seems odd, but was something gross at the time but strangely charming in retrospect.

I remember laying in bed actually praying during the Blues heartbreaking double-OT loss to Detroit in 1996. Maybe they would not have beaten Colorado that year, but I cried much different tears than the ones shed in Game 7 in 2019. How could we lose with the greatest player ever and our greatest goalscorer ever together?

I remember the television being the last thing to get packed up leaving my freshman year of college because the Blues were on in the playoffs. They made the Western Conference Final that year and that loss made me root against my favorite player of all time, Patrick Roy, in the final between Colorado and New Jersey. That did not pan out well either.

My wife and I went to her first NHL game during her first visit here from Canada. Unfortunately, they lost. Thankfully, the Blues managed to win the following year on the night I proposed.

The Blues have had a tremendous impact on my life, even though it is just a sports team. Their significant moments have, somewhat coincidentally, mirrored some of mine. The same is true of many fans in St. Louis and across the country.

The Blues made the young lives of Laila Anderson and Arianna Dougan, though Arianna lost her battle before she could see this happen. They have impacted @ash_gibbsblues enough for him to travel to St. Louis to let his little girl join the team on the ice, to travel to Winnipeg to be one of the only Blues fans there and to bring his family for the final.

There is no doubt that life is about more than sports. But it brings us together like very little else can.

We are all thankful for the ride the Blues took us on in 2018-19. We are all thankful for the way the city has come together and people have just been happy in a way rarely seen outside of the holidays, and even then maybe not.

It has been a magical time and the Cup is just the icing on a cake that has been baking for decades.