This takes me back, waking up in the morning knowing the Canucks can win the Stanley Cup in the evening.
The last time was a gorgeous spring day, going on summer. My playoff beard was almost as long as Trevor Linden’s. I had the day off from the restaurant, which gave me plenty of time to pull together my last-minute shows of support. The old black Canucks T-shirt was no longer adequate, so I bought my first Canucks jersey: home white, which I still have. I also made a Stanley Cup, which I don’t.
You can find everything you need to make a replica Stanley Cup in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant. The base was an overturned five-gallon bucket cleaned of canola oil. On top of that, a four-litre sour cream bucket. Then a 16-oz plastic container used for take-out salsa. And for the bowl, a standard tortilla chip basket. Wrap it all up in duct tape, don some white gloves and you’re the keeper of the Cup.
I had become used to cars honking downtown after Canuck wins, but it was something new to be be bombarded with honks while carrying the Stanley Cup down King Edward Avenue in the afternoon sunshine four hours before faceoff.
I hooked up with my girlfriend (we’ve been married since the Keenan years) and a few other friends. With no plan, we headed downtown early, but not so early that it was easy to find seating for five in front of a TV. Heading down Burrard Street we spotted the Century Plaza hotel, with a little known bar in the basement called the Mardi Gras. I had never been in it before. Once our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we could see it was almost empty and there were comfortable chairs under the 27-inch screen. I set the Stanley Cup on a table. Beer soon followed. We were holed up underground for the entire game — as was much of the Vancouver Police Department, a couple of blocks north.
Ready for Game 7: Lora (my wife), Wendy, Stuart and Craig.
Game 7 of a Stanley Cup final carries such a sense of finality. You’ve been on this ride for two long months (remember when Chicago’s Dave Bolland was day-to-day with a concussion?), and you know it’s all going to be over in a few hours. You just don’t know whether you’re going to have a Stanley Cup, or nothing but disappointment and memories.
The New York Rangers scored first. Somebody has to, I guess, but it felt awfully bleak to go down 2-0 by the end of the first period. Linden’s goal early in the second period cranked up the tension, but when Mark Messier made it 3-1, reality entered the bar — kind of like an ex you’ve managed to avoid for eight weeks. What business did we have thinking our Canucks could win a Stanley Cup against one of the NHL’s storied franchises?
Linden scored another, early in the third. Three to two. Game on.
The tension of the third period was hard to bear. Kirk McLean would have to stop everything or it would all be over, and Mike Richter would have to make a mistake. The only mistake he made was letting Nathan Lafayette’s shot whiz by him to hit the post — which really isn’t a mistake at all.
The Rangers survived. We slumped in our seats and finished off our beers as the Canucks were quickly forgotten and the live broadcast of Messier’s canonization commenced.
We shuffled out of the hotel and stopped on the sidewalk to consider the rest of our evening. It was still light out. The night was young. We weren’t usually the types to head home at nine o’ clock, but something in us had died. We had spent two months in bars, restaurants and crowded living rooms, and there was nothing left to which we could raise a glass. So we turned south on Burrard Street for home.
Had we made the opposite decision and turned north, we would have walked straight into one of the ugliest scenes in Vancouver history. Instead, I was oblivious to what was happening downtown until I turned on Sports Page to relive the game at 11 p.m., and then I was stunned. John Shorthouse and Alan Carter, who normally co-hosted U.News at 23:30 immediately after Sports Page, were doing a live hit from atop a building above Robson Steet, their voices unsteady and eyes red from pepper spray. Gas bombs billowed up from the street below them where riot police were marching. They looked scared.
A week or so later, Carter came into the restaurant and sat in my section. I don’t remember what he ordered (Kay Whitmore always had the chicken burrito), but I do remember a little joke I made. After setting his plate down in front of him, I brandished a wooden pepper mill from under my arm and said, “Would you like a little pepper spray with that?”
Carter didn’t think it was funny.
