As we are now just minutes away from the opening of the 2008-09 NHL season in North America, I thought it would be pertinent to remember exactly what drives us all to be fans of the greatest game on Earth.
So, as we all prepare to begin yet another season, let us keep in mind just what it is that we're chasing. Don't lie to yourselves. No team is hoping to just make the playoffs at the beginning of the season. No team is hoping to improve on last seasons' point total. No team is looking to give up less power play goals and score more at even strength.
Not to say that any or all of those things wouldn't constitute a successful season, but there is much more fueling these athletes than simply improving.
Every single player on every single team in the NHL has one thing on their mind as they await to take the ice for the first time this season: winning the Stanley Cup.
I once asked a family friend who had a short professional career in the East Coast Hockey League what he thought it would be like to win the Stanley Cup. His answer? "Take every good thing that has ever happened to you in your entire life, roll it up into a ball and then multiply it by one million."
There is no question that the Stanley Cup is the pinnacle of every professional hockey players' career. Winning the Cup means so much more than just getting your name in the hockey record books.
Winning the Cup makes all those hours you spent on a frozen pond in whatever corner of the world you hail from worth it. Winning the Cup makes every broken nose, lost tooth, shattered bone, and bloody face seem like nothing more than a hang nail.
Becoming a professional hockey player usually results from years, sometimes decades, of pouring every ounce of your blood, sweat, and tears into playing a game. Winning the Cup makes playing that game seem like the best career choice you could have ever made.
Winning the Cup isn't the result of individual talent or gifted play calling. Winning the Cup is the result of a group of men leaving a little piece of themselves on a frozen surface of ice on over 100 separate occasions during a nine month period of time.
Winning the Cup means building chemistry, not just on the ice, but off of it as well. At least 23 players filling the respective rosters' of 30 different teams, hailing from hundreds of different countries, thousands of different cities, putting their differences aside, breaking language barriers, ignoring sometimes bitter histories of one country's repression of another, all for one common goal. Getting a chance to hold the Stanley Cup above your head, forgetting where you came from or what language you speak, but realizing that you are one of the chosen few who have the distinct honor of knowing that you earned the title "Stanley Cup Champion."
The Stanley Cup is what brings cities together, no matter what political party your mayor or representative associates with. The moment the Captain of that special group of players that each one of us holds near and dear to our hearts is awarded the Stanley Cup, something inside every single person that calls themself a fan of that team gains a sense of accomplishment; a sense of reward.
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