EDMONTON – Oh, rats.
Canada’s latest attempt to bring home the Stanley Cup failed dramatically at the edge of the Everglades on Monday, leaving fans from Edmonton to Florida excited for the trip but crushed by the fate.
The Oilers fell one game short of a historic comeback, winning three in a row to tie the Stanley Cup Final series only to lose the decisive Game 7 to the Florida Panthers by a score of 2-1.
Thousands of fans who filled the plaza outside Edmonton’s Rogers Place stood stunned into silence watching on a big screen as Panthers players celebrated behind their net and the Florida crowd filled the ice with their signature black plastic rats. good luck.
Some in Edmonton threw their drinks at the screen, some hugged those who were sad, others started leaving with their hands in their pockets.
Inside the stadium, some 16,000 people also watched the game on the screens. An hour before the puck was dropped, police announced that all viewing areas were full and urged residents to stay away.
Still they kept coming, running happily along sidewalks, streets and bars to the sound of the continuous and primitive honking of car horns.
Blue and orange fans also formed a large contingent at the Florida track. A rough count of the tailgate parties under the palm trees out front put about half at the Oilers camp, the other half for the Panthers.
At one point, the Edmonton faithful’s chant of “Go Oilers Go!” dominated the local contingent’s shout of “Let’s go Panthers!”
It was a disheartening end to two months of playoff madness in Edmonton.
Fans chalked streets, got tattoos, wore T-shirts and waved Oilers flags from all manner of motorized transportation, including a fake Zamboni.
The Oilers were on the brink of history, repeating a feat accomplished only once in NHL history, when the wartime 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs lost three games and came back to win four in a row and take the Cup.
The near-victory captured the national imagination, but even more so in Edmonton. The city already has five Stanley Cups, but for decades it has been feeding on the remnants of the faded glory of Wayne Gretzky’s glory days in the 1980s.
The Stanley waiting game continues for the rest of Canada, which hasn’t had a Cup winner since the Montreal Canadiens in 1993.
Since then, Canadian teams have come close, sometimes painfully so, to getting Stanley back.
Five times they pushed their opponents to a decisive seventh game before going home empty-handed: Vancouver in 1994 and 2011; Calgary in 2004; Edmonton in 2006 and again on Monday.
For much of the last century, the Trophy had more or less had permanent resident status in Canada, traveling between Toronto and Montreal and moving to be with Gordie Howe and company in Detroit for a period in the 1950s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Stanley alternated between Canada and the United States, primarily between Montreal and Edmonton along with homes on the east coast of the United States, particularly Long Island.
In the 1990s, Canada was goodbye. Stanley was escorted by the New York Rangers in 1994. From Broadway, Stanley hit the road to California and New England, from Las Vegas to Florida, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt. He partied with penguins, weather systems, and natural disasters: hurricanes, avalanches, and lightning. He was a Blackhawk, a Blue, a Star, a Duck.
And now he’s a Panther.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 24, 2024.
– With files from Rob Drinkwater and David Boles in Edmonton and Gregory Strong in Sunrise, Florida.
Lisa Johnson and Faikha Baig, The Canadian Press
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