When the St. Louis Blues won the 2019 Stanley Cup, an unexpected thing happened. We both experienced and lost that feeling of it being the first time ever.
They say you never forget your first. That is true to varying degrees, but it might be the most true in sports and even more true for St. Louis Blues fans.
We have all wanted the Blues to win the Stanley Cup for as long as any of us can remember. Whether you were a fan from the inception of the team or born on June 1, 2019, you spent most of your life wanting that silver chalice for the city’s NHL team.
For those of us that have been fans forever, it was almost an all consuming thing. This is not true of all fans, since every team has people that cheer for them but are not consumed by that franchise, some of us would have traded anything for the Cup.
I said over the years that I would trade all the St. Louis Cardinals World Series trophies for one Stanley Cup. That might be blasphemous in St. Louis, but it is how I felt in my heart.
Perhaps not everyone took things that seriously, but we all wanted it. We wanted it right down to the bone.
Just to show how many people wanted it and how deeply they cared about that first ever Stanley Cup, the Blues championship parade and rally almost doubled the amount of people estimated in attendance for the last Cardinals’ celebration.
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It ended up being everything we ever dreamed it could be. There were so many wonderful stories about this team that made the experience even more than we could imagine.
You had the fact of the team firing the coach, being in last place to start 2019 and going through all the behind the scenes drama. You had guys’ buddies making strangely accurate predictions about goals in big games, players coming from nothing to be heroes and new legends made out of a team lacking upper-echelon superstars.
However, the only disappointing thing, now that it is all over, is the idea that we will never have that same feeling again. Even if the Blues win the Cup again in 2020 or two years from now or five years from now, it will not be quite the same.
We now live in a world where the St. Louis Blues are Stanley Cup Champions. Unless you were born on June 13, 2019 or after, you have experienced the Blues winning the ultimate experience in your lifetime.
Sure, babies don’t have any sense of what is going on, but they have lived through it to an extent. For example, I was around for the early-to-mid 80’s championships for the Cardinals. I did not remember them, but I could not say they had not won in my lifetime. The same is true for Blues fans now.
We can never again get that exact same feeling of a Blues’ Stanley Cup being the first ever. We may never again experience the craziness of seeing around 400,000 people reveling in one team and just enjoying life because of one sports event.
I believe this team is good enough to make a run at future championships. Heck, the Blues have put together enough good teams over the years to always have a chance. There was always some fateful thing that denied them.
Fate did not present obstacles that could not be overcome in 2019. Yeah, there was the hand pass and a couple suspensions, but this team was larger than all that. They were too together as a group to let that stop them.
It was so magical that it kind of tugs on you a little that it can only live in our memories now.
Nobody is going to not celebrate if the Blues win another one. We are all going to still party in our various ways. Still, there is something special about that first one and generations of Blues fans getting to experience it together. There is also something a bit sad about the idea it will never quite be the same if and when it happens again in our lifetimes.