Sunday, June 21, 2009
Robin Rombach/Post-Gazette
Ordinary does not make young fans -- and old -- scream in delight when you pass by as was repeated time and again during the team's Victory Parade through Downtown.
On the morning of Game 7, the nine-hundred millionth and final hockey game of the season, two of the game's charmed head coaches were searching earnestly for pretty much the same thing.
Mike Babcock, dean of the dynastic Detroit Red Wings, who were in their 18th consecutive postseason (the longest current streak in the major team sports) and on the verge of their 12th Stanley Cup championship, was looking for "ordinary."
Ordinary people? Ordinary shoes? Ordinary speech?
He didn't say.
Dan Bylsma, the only recently tenured coach of the persistently precocious Penguins, back in the building where the club had been outscored, 21-6, in consecutive playoff runs but still on the verge of its first Stanley Cup championship in 17 years, was looking for "normal."
Normal temperature? Normal procedure? Normal, Illinois?
He didn't really say, either.
No one had the heart June 12 to tell either one of them, but the train for Normal and Ordinary pulled out of the station sometime late last month. As Austin Powers, international man of mystery, might have put it, "That train has flown."
Between the two, both looking for some kind of calming element for their teams hours before a Game 7 that will not soon be forgotten, Bylsma should have known better.
For all his quotidian, bespectacled everyman demeanor, there was simply nothing ordinary about a man who was pushing pucks around in Wilkes-Barre on Groundhog Day coaching in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final.
Bylsma's Baby Penguins had won eight in a row when general manager Ray Shero drafted him to replace Michel Therrien as the main Penguins herder, then they had won 18 of the remaining 25 regular-season games, then they had won 15 of the first 24 playoff games.
Had the playoffs lasted another week, Bylsma might have had as many playoff wins as regular-season wins. As it is, he is 42-11-4 his previous 57 times behind the bench, and a full season of Bylsma figures to look something like 59-11-12.
Don't tell me about ordinary.
Ordinarily, a team with the top two scorers in the postseason -- Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin -- would not skate for 951/2 minutes without a goal, but that's what was going on when Ruslan Fedotenko's shot hoisted the Penguins off the deck in Philadelphia in the opening round. Little more than an hour later, they had five goals and a 4-2 series victory right there where ambiance is defined as an unrelenting din of "Crosby sucks!" vocals.
Ordinarily, you don't hand the captaincy of your NHL team to a 19-year-old, which the Penguins did May 31, 2007. The Penguins haven't failed to make the Stanley Cup final since.
Ordinarily, the best goal-scorer in the NHL is a person of substantial humility, at least publicly, and is rarely given to definitive statements regarding future events. But May 12 of this recent postseason, a night before his team would play host to the Penguins in Game 7 in Washington, Alexander Ovechkin said this: "When we're desperate, we have more power than anybody."
Perhaps, you'll remember how powerful they looked with the Penguins up, 5-0, on the way to 6-2. But you have to forgive Alexander the Great. He was the only player on either side that a Chambersburg, Pa., teen actually threatened to kill during the series. Which doesn't happen ordinarily.
Matt Freed/ Post-Gazette
Marc-Andre Fleury was anything but ordinary in the Cup-clincher, particularly after being run from the net in Game 5. He makes a save on Detroit's Johan Franzen late in Game 7.
Ordinarily, a franchise's all-time leading playoff scorer can be counted on to influence the course of events in a conference final, but Eric Staal disappeared in that round thanks to his brother, Jordan, and to Tyler Kennedy and Matt Cooke, who checked the elder Staal into oblivion. The Carolina Hurricanes were 7-0 in the postseason when Eric got a goal. Against the Penguins, he didn't get one until it was too late, early in Game 4. By that point, the Hurricanes were being swept from the playoffs for the first time since they were the Hartford Whalers.
Ordinarily, a former head coach of the Super Bowl champion Steelers wouldn't turn up in the arena of a Penguins playoff opponent specifically to crank a hurricane siren.
Ordinarily, a goaltender hounded from the net by five goals in the fifth game of the Stanley Cup final does not turn into its hero's hero in Games 6 and 7, but Marc-Andre Fleury did not only that, but survived to play out the ultimate street hockey/deck hockey/pond hockey/donkey hockey fantasy. He made a Cup-winning save with about one second on the clock.
Anybody who thinks that will happen again should volunteer for siren duty.
There will be more than enough historical adjectives to describe the sustained Penguins brilliance of 2009. Let us not leave out extraordinary.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com. More articles by this author
First published on June 21, 2009 at 12:00 am
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