The reason I get chills and want to
go bake a Hotdish while drinking an ice-cold Pop is that this team is probably as
much Minnesota’s team as any team in any sport is to any state or area. It’s because almost every player on the
Gophers is from our state specifically.
Taking from Baker’s story, they all seem to grow up playing on those
frozen ponds dreaming of one day playing for the Gophers. It’s the big leagues of that
demographic. Even when I was growing up
watching mostly other sports, I once asked my dad about the Twins, “Are all the
players on that team from our state?”
They should be, it felt like, so we could prove that we were better at
that sport than the other areas. And
that’s what this program epitomizes.
But the sport itself generally has
two major hubs of talent- Minnesota and Boston.
No two other places could produce as many colleges who are all that good
at hockey. And for the most part they
each take players from their respective areas.
There are good teams in places like Michigan and New York state for
sure, but none have as a deep of histories as the two aforementioned. So with all the recent sports success the
Boston area has had, this is pretty much our last grasp at besting them in
something. It seems even more personal
for us given all the good players the town has stolen away from our teams with
the allure of cash, but for once it’s nice that one sport has come down to
strictly home-grown talent.
I’m pretty sure the reason I don’t follow pro hockey that
closely is the lack of a pro hockey team in my state during my formative years.
I knew a lot of kids who played, but my
parents really didn’t encourage it because it was just about the most expensive
sport a kid could play and they (and I) liked most other sports better anyway. But the NHL has made some horrible mistakes
with the relocation of their teams.
Let’s examine- they moved a team from Hartford, Conn, to Raleigh,
NC. Not the obscure state capital I
would have picked, not to mention having to change the greatest logo of all
time. 2) Moving the Winnipeg Jets to
Phoenix, home of no natural ice… ever.
And 3) Moving The North Stars out of the State of Hockey to the State of
Football. (Sorry, Quebec- hockey seems
to have thrived in the move to Colorado, which never was a horrible place to go
to begin with.) But it was a good idea to bring major league hockey back to the
North Star State, if only because I could never be sure if the Moose (that
minor league team) was meant to be a singular or plural noun.[i]
And it’s really sad, when you think
about it, that this state, which invented the sport, went even as long as it
did without a pro team. It may indeed be semi-hypocritical of me to say that
teams shouldn’t ever leave the city they start in. It worked out pretty well for the original
Baltimore Orioles franchise (now known as the New York Yankees), it seems to
have worked out for the Dallas Stars (curse you, Tom Green!)[ii], and it
worked out alright for the original Washington Senators. But it seems like we’ve lost a part of our
state’s sports history having lost the North Stars. You never hear about the Stanley Cup Finals
run we had around the same time the Twins were winning their second World
Series, probably because we feel like it doesn’t belong to us anymore- it
belongs to Dallas[iii]. But you do see people walking around in North
Stars jersey-shirts (sweater-shirts?) or hats a lot around here, so it seems
like it meant something. I remember when
they were holding the naming competition and such for our new NHL franchise and
as a sports fan it was interesting. But
even then I didn’t really feel like I was going to get into it. I was used to having one team to root for in
the summer, one in the fall and one in the winter. When you’ve left an area for a while, even a
hockey-mad area, I think you end up losing a generation of fans, because
another sport will just take its place.
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