Longtime Panthers who lived through a lot of losing drink in the joy of a Stanley Cup

Hall of Fame goalie Roberto Luongo and career third-and-fourth liner Bill Lindsay share more than L surnames. Each got jettisoned to the Panthers by the NHL team that drafted him; got traded to an NHL team in Canada, but still called South Florida home; returned to the Panthers as a player; and, now, works for the organization he loves.

They were also the bookends Monday night at Amerant Bank Arena when the 2-1 win in Stanley Cup Final Game 7 during which they and other longtime Panthers employees wallowed in a deep bath of happiness earned after decades of sadness.

For the pregame customary drum banging, the Panthers called on special assistant to the GM Luongo. Exactly 24 years to the day after being traded to the Panthers from the Islanders, Luongo bashed the drum as if to summon a Panthers victory through sheer force of the percussive sound.

The game ended with team radio analyst Bill Lindsay, exactly 31 years to the day after the Panthers took him in the expansion draft, screaming ecstasy.

“YEEEAAAHHH! YEEEAAAHHH! LORD STANLEY IS COMING HOME! YOU ALWAYS IWLL HAVE A PLACE IN SOUTH FLORIDA! OH, MY GOD!...OOOOHHHH! YEEAAHH! STANLEY CUP CHAM-PI-ONS! WE’RE ON THE MOUNTAINTOP!...WE CROSSED THE FINISH LINE, BUDDY! WE CROSSED IT! OH, WHAT A BUNCH OF GUYS! PAUL MAURICE, CONGRATULATIONS! OH, WHAT A TEAM! WHAT A GUTSY DFFORT! THAT IS SOME COJONES, BOYS! WOW!”

Listen closely and you could hear Lindsay’s tears. You didn’t have to look closely to see the redness of recent tears in the eyes of Randy Moller, Lindsay’s former radio broadcast partner. Moller played for the Panthers for only the last 17 games of his 13-season NHL career. In the 29 years since , he’s run the Alumni Association, done community relations, radio play-by-play and color analyst (sometimes both jobs at once) and TV color analyst.

Moller said, “This is why I’m still here...”

“Really sweet,” he continued. “I’m so happy for everybody who’s been here a long time — Goldie, Billy, Jovo...means a lot, means a lot...”

“Goldie” is Steve Goldstein, the team’s radio play-by-play man from 1997-2007 and the TV play-by-play man since 2007. “Jovo” is Ed Jovanovski, who the Panthers took No. 1 overall in the NHL Draft 30 years ago did two turns as a Panthers player and now does analysis in the studio on Panthers TV broadcasts.

Hugging their way around ice during Monday night’s celebration were longtime front office staffers and equipment staffers, people who remembered entire seasons just trying to get realistically into the playoff race.

Luongo got traded to a Panthers team coming off their 1999-2000 playoff appearance led by goal scoring machine Pavel Bure, skilled sprite Ray Whitney and the myriad talents of Viktor Kozlov. With the NHL’s top goal scorer, the No. 1 young goalie prospect, plenty of up front speed and talent, who knew the Panthers were about to enter a then-NHL record 11-season playoff desert?

Luongo’s seen his team miss the playoffs by being historically bad at home, eight wins in 2002-03 while having a winning road record. He saw his team lose the other two goalies on the NHLroster in the waiver draft, a usually uneventful offseason event with rules specifically set to prevent a team losing two goalies (“The last man standing!” Luongo laughed as reporters entered the locker room the next day).

His team traded him to Vancouver in one of the NHL’s worst trades of this century. Luongo returned in 2013, retired in 2019 and immediately was hired as a special assistant. He’s the first Hockey Hall of Fame player to spend most of his career with the Panthers. But his excellence on the ice went unrewarded by team achievement during his 11 seasons as a player compared to his four years in the front office.

“Feels pretty surreal right now,” Luongo said. “But, when you look back, since the early 2000s to where we are today, it’s an unbelievable feeling.”

A reporter pointed out he played with lifelong Panther Aaron Ekblad (10 seasons), Luongo added Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov (11 seasons) and the first years of once-and-again Panther Dmitry Kulikov’s NHL career.

“So happy for them. So, so happy for them,” Luongo said. “When I was here, there were few tough years. They wanted to stay here and wanted to stick it out. So happy for them that they got to live this moment.”