“I’ve done lots of good things in my life and I will continue to do that, and so I wasn’t getting consumed with what was said or what my future holds or whatever. I’m in a pretty good spot.”
Barry Trotz
2018 Stanley Cup champion
Head Coach
Washington Capitals
I’M NOT SURE THAT I EVER really thought about what would happen if my lifer friend Barry Trotz or the Washington Capitals ever won the Stanley Cup. As a passionate hockey fan and Baltimore’s sole candle bearer for pimping the puck in the local media over a quarter of a century, it would have been a helluva personal gift to me if either ever happened individually – let alone simultaneously and in Las Vegas, no less.
I’m also not sure that I had any tangible image or pre-determined vision of the kind of joy that was expressed on the face of Alex Ovechkin as he hoisted the chalice toward the Nevada sky, beaming like the bright, radiant “forever” light shining outward from the Luxor and into the heavens above the desert on Thursday night just a few steps from The Strip.
Two hours later, in a town of broken dreams, big gambles and bigger payoffs – there I was sitting with my wife on the 3rd floor of the Mandarin Oriental overlooking Las Vegas Boulevard. Ovechkin was suddenly towering over the table of the last head coach the Baltimore Skipjacks would ever have – “Here, Boss, I brought The Cup over for you!” – as he plopped it in the middle of the corner table, where Trotz’s son Nolan was happily listening to music and doing some late night artwork.
Over my 27 years of doing sports radio, I’ve been fortunate enough to attend a few of these post-championship champagne soaked celebrations. I’ve attended three Super Bowl parties and one ridiculous bash with the New York Yankees in a club in Manhattan in October 2001 that I’d never be able to identify let alone recollect. The Ravens soiree in 2001 was a giant wedding under a tent in Tampa. Music, dancing, booze, etc. I saw Steven Tyler hand Robert Kraft the Lombardi Trophy in Houston while singing “Dream On” with members of Aerosmith as Kid Rock stood 10-feet away from me with Jamie Presley on his shoulders. More recently, I was at the Philadelphia Eagles throwdown/shitkicker on a sub-zero, frozen Minnesota night three months ago that featured 2,000 rabid fans in a giant atrium convention hall partying with the players until 5am.
This, however, was a different kind of event – an almost breathing point and place of happy solitude in taking stock of what had just happened before all of the mayhem of first pitches, baseball games, drunken fountain jumping and the monstrosity of a parade that awaited them in Washington, D.C. in the coming days.
Other than random Scandanavians jumping on a table and leading choruses of “Seven Nations Army,” this one was mostly tame. No loud music. Nothing more opulent than the setting
