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A human isn’t a human without dreams. They are the driving force for who we are, what we believe is worth fighting for, and serve as our ultimate inspiration to roll out of bed each and every day. And on my bedroom wall hangs two framed pictures. One of legendary defenseman Bobby Orr flying through the air milliseconds after clinching the 1970 Stanley Cup. The other is a grey-bearded Ray Bourque, from Boston to Colorado, lifting the Cup after over two decades of coming up just short.
They had dreams, and through a mix of belief and determination, saw them become a reality.
But for the Boston Bruins fan, the redheaded stepchild of the Hub’s sports scene, time was not kind.
Year after year, the Bruins fan tried to dream himself into a reality.
They wanted the hats, the commemorative DVDs, and they lusted for the parade.
They had seen the Celtics march through the streets of Boston in 2008 in celebration of their 17th title. They got increasingly bitter with each one of the Patriots’ seemingly annual parades. And they even saw the Boston Red Sox break their curse two times, and yet, they still had squat.
No parade, no championship t-shirts, and certainly no commemorative DVD.
Instead, the Bruins were constantly dealt the blow of a story that'd typically end with nearly 18,000 people vacating Causeway Street after another postseason glimmer of hope was violently murdered before their eyes. That didn't change their plea. Just one Cup. That's all they really wanted.
That request forever seemed like nothing more than a delirious fantasy our minds developed to keep us from jumping off the Tobin Bridge after every premature playoff exit. "Well, maybe if this happens," we'd barter, trying to figure how it'd all play out as if we didn’t already know how the story was going to end. "If this happens, then maybe they could do this and who knows what happens from there on out."
It had been almost 40 years. The Bruins were due like Tropic of Cancer was due back at the New York Public Library. And finally, a year after heartbreak against Carolina, it seemed as if the Bruins’ time was upon us. They stormed through a division rival in a battle of elite goaltenders in round one, and they stole the first three against Philadelphia in the second, putting them just one win away from their first Conference Finals appearance in almost 20 years. Then, like everything we've come to expect in our absurdly jaded lives as Bruins fans, the wheels came off. The B's dropped one game, two games, three games, and finally on home ice, the Bruins dropped the fourth and final game, eliminating themselves out of playoff contention with an unbelievable four-game (and four-goal) choke to the Flyers.
"I'm done with this [expletive] team," a middle-aged man in a Bourque -- a player that had to move on to chase the Cup in another city, as if he himself knew that this was never going to happen here -- jersey told me outside the TD Garden that night. "Enough with this [expletive]."
And like the B's hopes in the 2010, he slowly faded off down a darkened Boston street, throwing his golden rally towel into the trash on his way. Nodding in agreement, I followed a sea of black and gold into the subway on a train quiet enough to hear your thoughts without a lick of distortion from a normally boisterous Boston crowd. "Why do I do this to myself?" I thought, my head in my hands, staring down at my shirt that proudly displayed the Bruins' emblem from their 1972 Cup championship. "It's never going to happen. Why couldn't I have been a Red Sox fan like my mother?"
(Think, just for a moment if you will, the pure lunacy in wishing you had been born a pre-2004 Boston Red Sox instead of oh I don’t know, any other team in any other league to ever exist.)
Like every Bruins fan that night, I didn't know what to say, to think, or even how to act. I walked by children crying, fans fighting with one another (“Hey at least somebody in a Bruins jersey cares enough to do something?… I said), and everything in between that night. But I felt nothing. I was numb. Before the age of 20, the Boston Bruins did what they did to everyone else before me; They obliterated my hope that anything would change when it came to the ultimate fortune of this club’s bid for a Cup.
But as a glutton for punishment, I came back to the Garden the next fall with a hope that maybe -- just maybe -- something would be different about the B's. I ditched the staple of my high school and college days spent in row 11 of Balcony 314 as a season-ticket holder (it was pretty amazing that a high schooler could afford Bruins season tickets, but that’s what happens when you’re the championship-less laughing stock of the Boston sports scene), and I found myself suiting up on level nine of the Garden as a credentialed member of the press on behalf of HockeyBuzz.com. Watching from a different view, and with objectivity now something real and developing, I found myself looking at this Bruins team with the same view I had of them as a fan: Sure, they were good, but they didn't seem good enough.
I was no longer allowed to openly cheer the local club on, but I still had that feeling I’d try to convince myself of every April or so. “Well, if this maybe happens, who knows what can happen next, right?…
And from there, I can’t really tell you what happened. It was a two-month long out-of-body experience.
After falling in an 0-2 hole to Montreal in round one despite the otherworldly goaltending of one Tim Thomas, I thought to myself that maybe that guy in the Bourque jersey was right for quitting. We were surely due to witness the Bruins blow it away again, and there was nothing we could do to change that. They were heading to Montreal, a place they were utterly awful in, and they were by all means coming back to Boston swept out of the playoffs. That guy got out while he still could and we were the suckers. But in Montreal, something changed. The Bruins, a team known for their heartless bow-outs, gave a damn and punched the Habs back. Stealing both games in Montreal, and capping it all off with a double-overtime win in Game 5 and single overtime win in Game 7, Boston had a swagger.
"BELIEVE," the city read in spraypainted murals featuring the patented eight-spoked B. And after coming through with redemption in the form of a four-game sweep of the Philadelphia Flyers in round two, the feeling of being a Bruins fan didn't have that same sting. You were actually proud to be a Bruins fan (It was always weird to get laughed at in your own city for supporting the Bruins). It was anti-everything. You were deemed classless by most, you were downright mean, you didn't give a damn about either. For the first time in your life, or since the Days of Orr anyways, you were confident.
With the bounces on their side in a seven-game Conference Final win over the Tampa Bay Lightning, your confidence met a harsh reality in a round-four matchup with the Vancouver Canucks.
The reality was that the Canucks, a finely tuned machine of a hockey club if there ever was one, were undeniably better than the Boston Bruins. They were more skilled, they had serious (and I mean serious) depth, and they had the perfect amount of rest set to pick the aching Bruins apart.
"OK, well I mean if they’re going to pull this off, it just has to be this way, right?" You asked yourself, looking at the daunting task ahead of the club. "Just split in Vancouver and bring it back to Boston."
Instead of a split, though, you were hit with a gut-punch that you nearly forgot existed. In typical Bruins fashion, the club dropped Game 1 with just 19.3 seconds left thanks to the stick of Raffi Torres, and saw themselves sent packing back to the Hub in a two-game hole behind an Alex Burrows goal just 11 seconds into overtime. I sat there on my couch, with my friends in stunned silence, bringing me back to that lonely train ride just over a year ago, asking myself why I even thought the team would make this worth the effort. The Bruins were just happy to be there. That wasn’t going to be enough.
Yet, once again, the Bruins dug deep and battled back, winning both three and four on home-ice despite a season-ending injury to playoff hero Nathan Horton, and sent the series back to Vancouver.
And in search of their first series lead, the B’s were losers at the hands of Max Lapierre.
Through five games, it was a series that featured game-winning strikes from Torres, Burrows, and Lapierre. Hockey Gods? What a load of crap. That sinking feeling was back in your chest.
Back in Boston with the Cup in the building, the Bruins survived and bullied Vancouver with the same confidence that propelled them into the Finals to begin with. Then came the date: June 15th, 2011.
Nobody knew what to expect. Absolutely nobody. And the people that said they knew what was going to happen that night are complete liars. Everybody played it out so many different ways in their head, but the truth is that the Bruins had never been in this situation, and that it had been such a distant dream to even picture the Bruins in such a scenario proved to be too tall of a task for our brains to compute.
I sat in a basement with my childhood best friends. We had been through every Bruins downfall together. We had witnessed the embarrassments of 2005 to 2007 firsthand in the $10 student sections (even those tickets felt like a ripoff at that point). We had started every season with absurd predictions that never panned out. We watched Bergeron’s career nearly come to an end in Oct. 2007. For a group of kids in their early-20s, we had seen every Boston hockey tragedy firsthand, so why not one more?
It began with an unexpected Patrice Bergeron goal. We jumped up. Our celebration was one of cautious optimism, as nothing said the Canucks couldn't storm back with three goals in a minute, something that could very well happen to Boston given their history. Then Brad Marchand beat Roberto Luongo on a seeing-eye wraparound. 2-0. You were able to breathe just a bit now. On a white-knuckle ride of a second period, it was a shorthanded goal from Bergeron on a breakaway that made it 3-0 in favor of Boston. “Is this really going to happen?… we all thought but didn’t dare say aloud.
And when a hopping Brad Marchand put the finishing touches on it with an empty-net tally, it hit us.
We watched the clock die down to those precious few seconds, we saw the Bruins crowd around Thomas in his crease, and none of us knew what to say. In a basement never short on discussion, we sat in silence, in awe of what had just happened. For the first time in my life, I had no words.
Was it all a dream? How did this happen? Everything was so surreal, and the road traveled was unlike anything previously experienced in sports with three (three!) Game 7 victories and a legitimately unhealthy dose of overtime on the way. But that's why this date will always be so special to B’s fans.
The Bruins were not supposed to win. Not even close, actually. They were supposed to lose in round one, probably on home ice in overtime of Game 7. Michael Ryder wasn't meant to make a series-changing glove-save. Thomas wasn't supposed to stonewall Philly in four straight. Steve Downie should have beaten Thomas' paddle in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Final. The 5-foot-9 Brad Marchand should've been planted through the boards by one of Vancouver's defensemen. But for the first time in our lifetime, everything fell into place for the Bruins.
The entire run was magic.
It was a feeling I thought could only be expressed in still images hanging on my wall, and something that I thought was pure fantasy and nothing more. But this was real, and it was tangible. They had shirts! They had DVDs! And they even had a parade! It still didn't feel real. Walking around Government Center, looking at the signs, the tinfoil Cups, and the Black and Gold confetti. This was for us, the Boston hockey fan? The long-suffering, forever-jaded, hopeless Bruins fan? Finally, it all hit us, the Bruins did it. But every Bostonian knows that the Canadiens close out that 2-0 lead 99-percent of the time. They know that Downie's shot beats Thomas any other year. They understand that Vancouver wins that seven game series when given a 2-0 series advantage just about any other year.
But for all those hypothetical scenarios and outlandish fantasies that became nothing more than just that for once in the life of a Boston hockey fan, they have 2011. They have the month of April where no deficit proved to be too much for their local club. They have a month of May that rekindled a city's love for hockey. And they have a June that taught the city to believe that anything was possible.
They have June 15th, 2011, and that's something nobody can ever take away.
Ty Anderson has been covering the Boston Bruins for HockeyBuzz.com since 2010, is a member of the Pro Hockey Writers Association's Boston Chapter, and can be contacted on Twitter, or emailed at Ty.AndersonHB[at]gmail.com