Twenty Years Later: My Hurricanes Are Stanley Cup Champions Again

I need a minute to just say it out loud. The Carolina Hurricanes are Stanley Cup champions. Again. For the first time since 2006. And I don't think I've fully come down yet.

I was there for the start of it. Game 1 of the first round against Ottawa, in the building, in the noise, in that particular electricity you only get in a barn full of people who've been waiting a long, long time and can feel that this year might be different. You know the feeling if you've ever been in a crowd like that, everyone holding the same careful hope, nobody quite willing to say it out loud yet. Standing there for Game 1, I let myself believe it, just a little. The way you let yourself hope when a team means something to you and you can feel them building toward something.

After that I didn't miss a single game. Not one. All the way through, 16 wins and 3 losses, every night parked in front of the big screen at the house like it was my job. And the whole run, my phone never stopped buzzing, because my family had a group text going that turned into its own kind of playoff tradition. Every goal, every gut-punch, every overtime, all of it narrated in real time by the people I love most.

Here's what makes that group text funny, if you know anything about living in this part of North Carolina: we do not all root for the same teams. There's a Duke-Carolina rivalry running right through this family that gets genuinely heated come basketball season, the kind of thing that can frost over a Thanksgiving table. But hockey? The Canes? On that one thing, every last one of us is united. Whatever color we bleed in March, in June we all bleed Hurricanes red. There's something wonderful about a team that can do that, that can be the one flag a divided house all salutes.

And this group earned it. Down 2-1 in the Final to Vegas and they just took over. Rod Brind'Amour, who captained the 2006 Cup team, lifting it again as the coach twenty years later, that's the kind of full-circle story you couldn't sell as fiction, and I write fiction for a living. Taylor Hall, Jackson Blake, and Nikolaj Ehlers sealing Game 6. Jordan Staal finally getting his hands on the Cup again and taking home the playoff MVP. A team without a single traditional superstar proving you can win the whole thing on heart, depth, and refusing to quit.

Twenty years is a long time to wait. It was worth every minute. Caniacs, we finally get to say it again: Stanley Cup champions.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a group text to go be insufferable in.

Alright, fellow hockey people, find me and let's celebrate. Were you a Caniac through the lean years too, or is your heart somewhere else in the league? Who's your team, and what's the win you're still waiting on? jon@jdcoker.com. And to my fellow Caniacs: what a year. Let's savor it.