Oh yeah. THAT. Kind of a big deal! St. Louis’s beloved perpetual losers are perpetual losers no more. The watch parties and the parade are easily some of my best memories, not just as a Blues fan, but as a fan of sports in general. 

Downtown overrun with people from all walks of life clad in their Blues gear on some fairly warm and muggy June afternoons and evenings reminded me of why I love sports. It’s the people. Walking back to the train and high fiving fans that were pouring out of the watch parties and singing Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” in celebration will forever live in my memory, and is definitely the height of my nearly 27 years of sports fandom/existence on this earth.

Frankly, it’s still setting in that they even did it. Even as I stare at a puck on my desk that tells me the Blues are, in fact, 2019 Stanley Cup Champions, it’s surreal. I assume if I surround myself with enough merchandise that tells me the St. Louis Blues are the 2019 Stanley Cup Champions I’ll eventually feel normal saying they won something. 

The last I wrote about hockey, I was making a case that the sport is volatile. The Tampa Bay Lightning had just been bumped from the playoffs after an NHL-record setting regular season. Here is the end of my last hockey blog:

“While sure, fans can hope and dream for the Stanley Cup trophy to parade down Market Street in downtown St. Louis, perhaps that in itself is a bit too optimistic, given the odds and precedent set in previous seasons. But it’s the NHL playoffs! The ridiculously impossible is possible. 

If Tampa Bay can lose, why can’t St. Louis win?”

Fear And Loathing of the NHL Playoffs, April 18, 2019

Folks, St. Louis won. Hell I think I’m convincing myself more and more as I write this. They won! They were the worst team and hockey at a time that didn’t matter and the best team in hockey when it did.

That “worst to first” narrative has been popular when talking about the St. Louis Blues and their newfound Stanley Cup. Sure, turning the ship around in a matter of months is incredible. Craig Berube was the voice the locker room needed all along, and rightfully was the first person in the organization to get a personal day with the Cup this summer. 

There’s a deeper “worst to first” narrative that goes back much longer. The worst I, and many others, have ever seen the Blues was 2006. Ownership was changing hands. 05-06 was the season that killed the Blues record setting playoff appearance streak, and killed it in spectacular fashion, finishing dead last in the NHL.

That season, the Blues were far and away the worst team in hockey. Attendance to games had been cut in half, the team was nowhere near talented enough to compete. The Blues leading scorer that year was a 38-year-old Scott Young. Their starting goalie was Patrick Lalime, backed up by the incomparable duo of Jason Bacashihua and Reinhard Divis.

The next season, Dave Checketts and John Davidson in management vowed to be better, which never came to fruition. This was the start of a six-year span where the Blues only made the playoffs once, in 2008-09, and were quickly eliminated in that singular appearance.

In 2012 Tom Stillman led a local ownership group in purchasing the majority of the St. Louis Blues from Dave Checketts’ group, and very recently purchased the remaining minority. While many will look to the ice for the Blues struggles in this “post-lockout” period, one can look at the Blues since this time for an example of what a dedicated owner will do for a franchise. 

Stillman, like seemingly fewer and fewer owners in professional sports, actually spends money on his team to succeed. Which, from a fan’s perspective, is what you demand from the billionaires that own your favorite teams. Just ask a Cardinals fan how they feel about their billionaire owner building a high rise past center field instead of signing a starting pitcher this offseason.

In the 2017-18 NHL season, the Blues failed to meet expectations, and failed to make the playoffs. Last summer, Stillman and Blues general manager Doug Armstrong set out to make sure that failure wouldn’t repeat itself. 

Ryan O’Reilly was signed, and he became the central element in the Blues attack, adding a dimension and complimenting other scorers, such as Vladimir Tarasenko. Tyler Bozak’s addition, if nothing else to those who might have only watched their playoff run, made for this now infamous quote: 

“I want to win a Cup. So damn bad.

That’s why I signed in St. Louis. There’s your headline. Print it.”

Tyler Bozak, The Player’s Tribune, “For Toronto”

It’s taken me a month of stewing and nearly 900 words to really have this set in. At the time of the Stillman group’s 2012 acquisition of the Blues,  often maligned NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said “I know he won’t rest until the players are hoisting the Cup.

I think they can take it easy now.