The final horn groaned at 10:39 p.m. Thursday evening, and inside Madison Square Garden it was a merry mélange of color and sound and pageantry: part Times Square on New Year’s Eve, part Led Zeppelin circa 1973.
There were 18,006 people stuffed inside the old rink on top of Penn Station, and they weren’t planning on using the trains anytime soon. They were going to rattle the pinwheel roof, and rock the freshly painted walls. They were going to stick around for a while, and leave their voices where they stood:
“WE WANT THE CUP!”
“WE WANT THE CUP!!”
“WE WANT THE CUP!!!”
There was an old joke that said if you wanted to count the number of hockey fans in any given city, count the number of seats in that city’s arena and they would match up perfectly. That was always an exaggeration, but it was a point of pride for many hockey fans: Theirs was a modest devotion but a fierce one. Win or lose, thick or thin, first place or last.
Well, Rangers fans awakened this morning to an odd, wonderful reality: Hockey owns New York City for now, and for the next few weeks, and the Rangers are our benign despots. Actually, they probably expected this; it probably didn’t take until 10:41 Thursday night before the most strident loyalists shook their head at what by that point was already a rapidly filling bandwagon.
But here’s the thing:
There’s nothing wrong with a bandwagon. There’s never anything wrong with a bandwagon. Bandwagons don’t form in vacuums, and they aren’t constructed in honor of losing — or even modestly successful — teams. They are built in times of triumph, with the vapor of victory strong and addictive.
And this bandwagon, painted red, white and blue and bursting at the bow already, four days before the Cup finals even begin? It may be the biggest we’ve ever seen around here, simply because so many of its occupants couldn’t have identified a blue line even two weeks ago, and still more would have a hard time picking the Rangers’ most famous player, Henrik Lundqvist, out of a lineup.
This is not a new thing, of course. Twenty years ago, three days after the Rangers won their first Stanley Cup in 54 years, police estimated that 1.5 million fans braved steamy, 89-degree conditions to line the Canyon of Heroes. And many of those folks still couldn’t tell you the difference between Jeff Beukeboom and Boom Boom Geoffrion.
And was that really so terrible?
No, this is a come-one, come-all brigade of a bandwagon, no loyalty oaths required, no proof of residence or reticence, no working knowledge of the rulebook necessary. This isn’t a hockey thing anymore, or a Rangers thing. This is a New York thing. Too rare are the times that we’re all truly in this together. And while Devils fans and Islanders fans will surely blanch at the thought, this is in a very literal sense la cosa nostra.
Our Thing.
Look, the core Rangers fans will shake their heads at this, and it might bother them a bit, and there may even be cause for this to aggravate them a lot. Fans suffer far more often than they savor, they spill blood a lot more regularly than they sip champagne, and by rights that faith should be rewarded a hundred times over when a beautiful ride like this Rangers ride falls out of the sky for them.
And here’s the thing: They know who they are, and they can identify one another pretty easily, the ones who fight through the snow because they have upper-level tickets to see a Garden game in January, the ones who stay up past 1 a.m. on work nights to see overtime and the shootout from Calgary or Edmonton, the ones who knew enough to instantly embrace Martin St. Louis, the ones prescient enough to have added a Dominic Moore sweater to their collection even before Wednesday’s game-winner.
You know who you are, and we know who you are, and those of us who pack the bandwagon now like it’s Spicoli’s VW Bus understand that no matter where this ride ends, no matter where it takes us, we can’t possibly enjoy it as much as you can, as much as you will. No argument on that. Nolo contendere.
But the bandwagon’s heating up anyway. The keys are in the ignition. The tank is full, the oil’s been changed, and we’d really like for you to join us.
After all: Without you, how would we know who all the players are?