No home game in South Florida sports history has weighed more. Felt heavier.
And all of that weight lifted off the Florida Panthers late Monday night in the Sunrise home arena filled with the sounds of rapture, and relief. The weight lifted because so did the NHL’s Stanley Cup championship trophy for the first time in the club’s 30-season history.
With a 2-1 victory over the Edmonton Oilers in the winner-take-all Game 7 of the Final, a franchise officially announced itself as a force in hockey. The team from the tropics, from the suburb once best known for a shopping mall, had arrived.
The Panthers beat more than Edmonton on this night.
They denied all of Canada, the hockey-inventing country that has not seen one of its teams raise the Cup since 1993.
They denied Connor McDavid, currently the consensus greatest player in the sport, his first Stanley Cup in a nine-year career, instead only magnifying the one giant hole on his resume.
