St. Louis Blues: Why The Stanley Cup Means So Much To Us

To the rest of the country, the St. Louis Blues winning the Stanley Cup might draw yawns and shrugs. To us, it means more than the world itself.

The St. Louis Blues might not have the pedigree or history of the Original Six teams. They might not have the cache of big cities like New York or Boston or even fellow Midwestern city Chicago.

Nevertheless, sports mean just as much, if not more, to the people within the area and those outside of it that still root for the St. Louis teams.

Of course, everyone knows about the St. Louis Cardinals at this point. They are one of the few Midwestern teams that gets any respect nationally. That likely comes from the fact they have won 11 world championships and dominated everything baseball west of the Mississippi for decades.

The Blues don’t have that kind of clout behind them. The franchise was actually, in part, granted to St. Louis instead of other cities because the owners of the Chicago Blackhawks wanted to get rid of ownership of the St. Louis arena.

Much like we seem to be experiencing with other sports, St. Louis was not originally seen as worthy on its own merits. Nevertheless, fans showed the league they were right to put a team here.

Fans packed the St. Louis arena in their Sunday best back in those early days. Saturday night hockey was a chance to be seen as well as root on a fantastic hockey team. People always fall back on the Blues playing in an expansion division, but they had great teams and great players. Some of them might have been at the end of their careers, but they still made their mark.

For anyone of the right age, Glenn Hall and Jacques Plante are still revered in St. Louis, though they made their names elsewhere. The Plager family is St. Louis royalty, even though he was from Kirkland Lake, Ontario.

You can talk all about expansion this and watered down that, but the fact remains those Blues teams went to three-straight Stanley Cup Finals. Not many franchises in the league can say that.

Those teams might have failed to win a game in the final series, but they were facing all-time great teams. Montreal was a juggernaut and Boston had so many great players, it might be easier to name the ones not in the Hall of Fame.

Even so, the Blues did their city proud. St. Louis became home to so many of them and the people of this area adopted them like they were from the city.

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As the years piled up, so did the names. Bernie Federko, Brett Hull, Adam Oates, Scott Stevens, Brian Sutter, Brendan Shanahan, Craig Janney, Curtis Joseph, Al MacInnis, Chris Pronger, Wayne Gretzky, Gary Unger, Keith Tkachuk and so, so many more made their mark in St. Louis.

It seemed to not matter whether you played an entire career here or one shift, fans embraced you just the same as long as you pulled on that Blues sweater. There was a reason so many players stayed here after their playing days were done and, as much as we might like this area, it was not really just because of the city.

The people are what made players stay. They got treated as though they lived here their entire lives and that made them want to raise families here.

St. Louis is now home to second-generation NHL players with the Tkachuk family. MacInnis and several other former Blues ended up coaching after their playing days and helped guide the new generation. St. Louis has now produced several NHL players and many of them are top-tier.

Jeff Brown gave back to the community by coaching both young players and older ones. He guided the St. Louis Bandits to one of their three Robertson Cup championships in the NAHL.

Those players and the current ones are truly part of our city. People grew up listening to Dan Kelly and now they hear John Kelly.  They are all family to us. And do not think it is not reciprocated.

Former Blues players were dying for this city to get a Stanley Cup. Players that had not laced up a pair of skates in decades were living and dying with every game, the same as we were.

Bobby Plager had to spend lots of time during the playoffs roaming the hallways because the games made him too nervous. You could tell how giddy Federko was prior to the first game of the Cup Final. He looked like he was ready to get out there and take them all on himself, he was so amped.

Even guys that barely made a blip on the larger radar like Jamie Rivers and Reed Low let fans know how excited they were. They kept things relatively calm since they were on radio or television, but their emotions were still on their sleeves at times.

Rivers even admitted that players that had been in St. Louis long enough did feel a certain amount of guilt. They wanted so badly to be a part of the team that finally got the Cup here.

That is a big reason why this win meant so much. Fans always get their feeling tangled up in the emotions of wins and losses and we often make sports too big a part of our lives. When you think about it, losing a game or playoff series should not affect us the way it does, but it does. Some people shrug it off and others are depressed or angered the entire summer.

When you know former players are in that boat right along with you, it brings you that much closer to the team itself. Many professional athletes talk about never having really rooted for a team as a kid. They were too focused.

Hockey is different. Almost every player grew up wanting to put on a certain sweater and lift that Stanley Cup. Once you get to the pros, you lose a little bit of that wanting it to be with a certain team, but the Cup is ever present. Knowing that so many guys still bled blue and wanted someone, anyone to lead their former team to a championship made it that much more special.

Then, of course, you have just about every touching story you could get on the way. Born and bred in St. Louis, Pat Maroon got to lift the Cup with the team he grew up wanting to play for. He knew how much it meant to the fans and you could tell it in his voice afterward.

I truly believe that is why this team could not win in Game 6. Whether you think they should be above that or not, I think the players knew what was at stake and how the entire city was waiting to blow like a powder keg and they got the tight cheeks because of it. Even so, that allowed them to refocus and take the next game.

You had a goaltender come out of nowhere and become an MVP of the team, even if not the playoffs. You had a wonderful little girl in Laila Anderson that truly inspired the team with her infectious spirit and will. It was all a story that would be too unbelievable for Hollywood.

To us, as individuals, it means more than it probably should. Still, nobody said being a fan ever made sense.

My father, who came to St. Louis from Chicago, took my mom on a date to a hockey game in the Blues first season here and fell in love with both the person with him and the team itself, cried tears of joy when it was all done, as did my mother.

Most people that know me in person would say I have a dry personality. I tend not to show much emotion, but seeing the Blues win for the first time in my 37 years broke my heart into pieces of pure joy. It was impossible not to shed tears. I had to hold myself up on the glass from the emotion. My wife grew up a Boston fan and has only been in St. Louis since 2014 and she was moved by it all. It helped that her first ever NHL game was a Blues game with me, but still

Our stories are just a couple of thousands. So many of us, whether we were there from day one or any of the many after, grew up with the Blues. You follow a team and put your heart on the line so many times only to get it trampled on, and the Blues always found new and creative ways to do that.

They made the final in three straight years, only to get swept each time. They got to the conference final in 1986, but lost in heartbreaking fashion to Calgary just when you thought the Monday Night Miracle was a sign.

St. Louis had the best team in the league in 2000, but washed out in the first round. We had Gretzky and Hull together in 1996 and were gutted when Steve Yzerman scored that goal. 2001 was a great team, but Colorado was a buzzsaw. Years rolled on and we always got frustrated, but it just felt like the Blues would always be a bridesmaid.

To win it in a year when you fire your coach, fans were frothing at the mouth to blow the team up and you were in last place to start 2019 is so fitting of this franchise. It gave us all sleepless nights, but we would not have it any other way.

It is impossible to quantify or measure how much anything means to anyone. So, it would be useless to say winning a Cup means more to St. Louis than any other city, but it feels like it does to those that live here or are fans of this team.

There’s the fan that drove hours from Ontario to Winnipeg to see the Blues against the Jets. There is the family that flew down from Canada just to see their team attempt to make history. A Dutch fan made enough friends through social media that they set up a GoFundMe to get him over to America to see the Blues play.

Places that have no business liking hockey do, even if they are ignored. There are fans in Cape Girardeau and Desoto and Park Hills and all the way across to Kansas City. The Blues do not get credit due to the size of the market, but the size of their fan base is more formidable than anyone ever knew.

We filled an entire arena to watch games on television. Fans packed an empty baseball stadium to do the same. The streets of St. Louis will be a sea of blue for the championship parade.

It means so much to us because this team is us. Lots of teams have the word nation in their title because it sounds catchy. The Blues truly are a nation to themselves.

We comprise so many different ethnicities and walks of life. People you would have no clue had any idea about hockey are die-hard fans.

Like any family, we do not always get along. The online battles over goalies are as legendary as some of the guys that have worn the Blues mask. Still, we all wanted this result for as long as any of us can remember.

Winning almost feels so strange that 2019-20 will be just as surreal since we don’t have that old “just give us one before we die” mentality any more. We will worry about that when the time comes.

Blues fans have waited a lifetime for this, whether old or young. Our alumni was right with us the entire way – it was hard not to get choked up seeing all the alumni at Game 6, ready to celebrate.

It means so much to us because this is our very first and we had to wait so very long to get it. All of us hoped and we all believed every year could be the year, but when it finally happens it still defies belief. This might be the shortest offseason any of us have ever experienced, but we will remember all of this for a lifetime.