Cote: Awful weather rains on Florida Panthers’ Stanley Cup celebration — and it was glorious | Opinion

The weather in The Sunshine State did not cooperate in the least with the Florida Panthers’ championship parade and celebration Sunday just off the Atlantic Ocean in Fort Lauderdale. The sky rolled in grayish black off the water, lightning cracked and thunder clapped. The rain let up at times but never really stopped.

And it was glorious.

Six days after the Panthers won their first NHL Stanley Cup championship trophy in the franchise’s 30th season., the weather gave a crowd I would guess at 50,000-plus a chance to prove their love and devotion to their hockey team that much more ... because nobody left. Instead, fans turned the nasty weather into a party, cheering louder at every peal of thunder. Frisbees flew through all of it.

The sky rained. The Panthers reign. All was good.

“We waited 30 years for this,” said fan Tony Welch of Fort Lauderdale, there with his wife and three kids and smiling up at the rain. “Nothing was going to stop us, not even lightning.”

As we spoke a man sauntered by carrying a cardboard sign that read, ‘Welcome 2 S. Florida Stanley.’ The sign was fixed atop a shower curtain rod. The man wore a Stanley Cup hat wonderful in its awfulness, made entirely of tin foil.

The party was going both ways. The Panthers were doing their share. Small hints?

Many of the Panthers celebrated shirtless. Captain Aleksander Barkov was drinking unnamed libation from a shoe atop a double-decker bus. Defenseman Aaron Ekblad stood on the stage following the parade wearing a traffic cone on his head. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Teammate Ryan Lomberg fell back off the stage into adoring arms and crowd-surfed.

Coach Paul Maurice, addressing the massive throng, at one point turned from the fans to the team gathered behind him, and shouted with joy, “Thirty [bleep]ing years! Thirty [bleeping years! This is for all of you!”

Memory of Game 7

Maurice had been at the hockey arena by 3 a.m. the morning of Game 7. The bank of TVs in the team’s video room was on, and one had a scroll on the bottom that kept asking, of the Panthers after three straight losses: “Is this the biggest collapse in sports history?” Florida’s coach didn’t need the reminder.

“Having lost three in a row, your dream slipping out the door ... I just wanted belief and courage from our guys,” he would say later. “I wanted them to feel the freedom to play their game.”

On the side, embodied by Edmonton superstar Connor McDavid, “biggest collapse in sports history” was the freight train that would have hit Maurice and his team head-on had they lost Game 7. It would have done worse than kill them. It would have left them alive to hear the derision and mocking. The year 1942, when last an NHL team had blown a 3-0 Final lead and lost, would have been on this coach and franchise like a Scarlet letter.

Surreal moments

The ancillary stuff all disappears by degrees now. The three straight losses that heaped all that pressure on Florida. The fact the Panthers were outscored 23-18 in the Final. It all fades to tiny-type footnotes because history notes who won, not how, and history’s reward is the same as Game 7’s:

Winner-take-all, and for all time.

Winning players all get their time with the Stanley Cup, starting when it got passed around to hold and lift on the ice after Game 7.

“It didn’t feel real,” center Sam Bennett said of that. “It was the coolest moment of my life.”

Every player will get his day with the Cup, too, and some of the plans are emotional and sweet, like the promise Bennett and his father Dave made to each other more than 20 years ago.

“Me and my Dad, ever since I can remember, we’ve always said the first thing we would eat is Cap’n Crunch out of the Stanley Cup,” he said. “I have to hold true to my 6-year-old self. I’m pretty excited to do that.”

Long time coming

The captain and career-long Panther, Barkov, was drafted by Florida on June 30, 2013 — 11 years to the day before the championship parade. He has since become the best player and quiet cornerstone of the club even as Matthew Tkachuk and goalie Sergei Bobrovsky have their turns as fan favorite.

The night of Game 7 Barkov was a minute or so into an on-ice interview with a throng of reporters the night of the biggest win of his life, when someone too small to be seen behind him reached up to touch his shoulder. Barkov, still on skates and in full uniform, turned to see his mother Olga.

Their hug was a long embrace I wished had gone on forever. During it, not a word was spoken.

I felt my eyes glistening.

Getting everyone involved

The night all of their lives changed, before the on-ice ceremonies, Panthers players and coaches streamed into their locker room for a private team celebration.

Two city of Sunrise firefighter-paramedics, always on assignment to be near the team in case of emergency, were outside the closed door. They heard the muffled celebration inside.

Suddenly the door opened.

“What are you guys doing out here!?” a voice said.

The paramedics stammered, thinking they were being scolded for being too close.

“Get in here!” boomed the voice as they were welcomed into the raucous room.

Soon after, on the ice, a fan with a cup of beer was lifted high enough to lean over the top of the Plexiglas and pour.

Below, mouth agape, Panthers forward Ryan Lomberg was catching as much as he could through a wide grin as the fans roared approval.

Eating his words

When the Panthers hired Maurice as coach in June 2022 a local columnist wrote about the decision under the headline:

Paul Maurice!? Florida Panthers swap coach of year finalist for guy No. 1 in career losses

I have not been invited to head up the Welcome Wagon for anybody since.

The headline was not inaccurate. Florida general manager Bill Zito opted to not retain interim coach Andrew Brunette after he’d led the Cats to the Presidents Trophy with the NHL’s best record and highest-scoring team, though the season ended abruptly with a second-round playoff sweep by rival Tampa Bay. Brunette was a top-coach finalist who’d never been a head coach when elevated early that season after champion-pedigreed Joel Quenneville abruptly was forced to resign over a 10-year-old scandal from when he’d been head coach in Chicago.

Zito passed over Brunette to hire, in Maurice, a man who ranked No. 1 in most career coaching losses and had never won it all, losing in his only Stanley Cup Final in 2002 with Carolina.

I wrote it was a “a dubious decision until the new guy proves it was the right one.”

The “new guy” proved it was, if you will pardon the understatement.

Maurice stepped in boldly, completely revamping the way the Panthers would play and the identity they would have.

The exciting, offense-minded Cats would become a defense-first team with a style designed to be “playoff hockey.”

It was the most dramatic stylistic change by any coach this market had seen since the Dolphins’ Don Shula, who had won Super Bowls with Larry Csonka and brute-force, run-first offense, then drafted Dan Marino. And suddenly the old-school Shula would be out front in the NFL’s transformation to air-raid, pass-first attacks.

Maurice’s new-look Cats, regaling in the trade that brought Tkachuk in exchange for Jonathan Huberdeau, reached the club’s first Stanley Cup Final since 1996 in his first before losing.

One year later: Sunday’s championship celebration.

Maurice still has the most career losses, by the way. But now nobody will ever care about that again, because a single Stanley Cup trophy held aloft is greater than all else.

Early in the Final series Maurice with surprising candor had admitted, “I need one. I gotta win a Stanley Cup” after almost 30 years behind an NHL hockey bench trying. But in finally raising the Cup, Maurice felt an epiphany.

“I didn’t win the Stanley Cup tonight,” he said. “I got to share it. That’s what I learned. You don’t win a Stanley Cup. You get to share it. “

Rare company

Appreciation for winning a major sports championship is such that cities literally throw a parade -- because winning them is hard. The occasional true dynasty in sports is the anomaly, the rarity. South Florida’s professional sports history mirrors the difficulty:

▪ Miami Dolphins: Two championships (1972, ‘73) in 58 seasons — The franchise was six years old when they it won back to back Super Bowls including a Perfect Season as Shula’s arrival proved magical. But Shula would never be champion again and even the great Marino fell short. The Fins’ record in Super Bowls is 2-3, the last shot at it in 1984, and it has now been 50 years and counting -- a half century -- since the Dolphins last won it all.

▪ Miami Marlins: Two championships (1997, 2003) in 32 seasons — The then-Florida Marlins won the World Series in only their fifth season and repeated six years later, but that early franchise momentum braked and spun into reverse. The Fish have not come close to the top in the 21 seasons since, gradually falling out of relevance in MLB and in their own home market, thanks largely to chronic, continuing under-spending by ownership.

▪ Miami Heat: Three championships (2006, 2012, ‘13) in 36 seasons — It took 18 years (and drafting Dwyane Wade) for the Heat to finally win an NBA title. LeBron James and Chris Bosh joining Wade brought two more trophies, but the Big 3 era ended too soon, in four seasons, and so have the championships. The Heat’s record in NBA Finals is 3-4, the title drought enters its 11th season, and now East rival Boston reigns as new champion.

▪ Florida Panthers: One championship (2024) in 30 seasons — Cats fans paid their dues and saw their patience finally rewarded, after earlier Stanley Cup Final losses in 1996 and 2023 and about two decades of not winning a whole lot in between. The team seems well-positioned to continue strong and compete for more rings. But this is sports. Shula thought that, too, in 1973.

▪ Inter Miami: Zero championships in four years entering the ongoing 2024 season — That “never won” could change as the arrival of global superstar Lionel Messi last summer helped turn this team from a Major League Soccer also-ran to a league power currently atop the MLS East standings. But this is sports. Not even Messi comes with a guarantee.

Combined, our current Big Five pro teams have won eight championships across 160 seasons, an average of exactly one every 20 years.

If you want to include the market’s biggest college team, Miami Hurricanes football has won five national championships in 87 seasons, though none since ever-distant 2001. So add Canes football alongside our pro team history and that’s 13 championships in 247 combined seasons.

Pro or college, no matter the sport, being better than everybody else is hard.

That’s why, when it happens, we forget our divisions for a minute and feel like a community again and throw a parade.

We cherish the memories, and try to always remember the feeling. We treat it like a family heirloom. We even show up in the rain, lightning and thunder all around, and we love every minute of it.

Because, even as the rain is falling like confetti, we know there’s a chance we might never see this again.