By 1998, the Downcity section of Providence
was a far cry from the frown city it had been at the other bookend of the
decade. There were plenty of relatively new and shiny establishments already in
place. There were still more, not the least of which being the Providence Place
Mall, on tap to emerge in the coming year.
With that being said, the flavor of
the sixth season of the Providence Bruins, the entity that most visibly
spearheaded the city’s turnaround, could not have been improved with a
full-pound bag of sugar. As their follow-up on the comeback upset of Worcester
in the 1997 playoffs, their caliber receded under the misguidance of coaches
Tom McVie and assistant Rod Langway.
The seasoning of McVie and the NHL Hall of
Fame playing credentials of his assistant were no substitute for the youthful,
relatable energy of Bob Francis and skating sidekick Peter Laviolette, who had
each moved on to hard-earned opportunities elsewhere in the summer of 1997. An
auspicious 3-1-1 start to the 1997-98 campaign gave way to an eleven-game
winless skid, and the P-Bruins ultimately finished eighteenth out of eighteen
AHL teams with a 19-49-12 record.
In accordance with those results,
fanfare started to fade. Whenever that happens in the minors, open or
suppressed panic is in order. Despite the preceding craze from 1992 and the
ensuing five years, it was plain that no brand, not even the most brilliant brand,
is invariably safe at this level. Hardcore hockey fans, and especially Bruins
fans, were likely going to keep coming no matter what. But in a way, the Baby
B’s risked being victims of their own success if they failed to supplement
their fan base by too often losing too many ticketholders to the other local
attractions that had followed their inception.
As such, going on its seventh year of
operation, the Providence Bruins franchise needed to revamp its product on the
ice in a pinch. The first step toward a quick fix was a change in leadership,
and for that they went back to a familiar face in Laviolette. The former
blueliner, team captain and assistant coach was coming off a brilliant year
with the ECHL’s Wheeling Nailers, where he was ironically preceded by McVie as
well. Under his watch, that team had gone from losing in the first round of the
1997 Kelly Cup playoffs to reaching the third round in 1998.
While a minor-league team only gets
so much autonomy in personnel changes, the parent club in Boston would give
Providence a generous overhaul in the summer of 1998. Laviolette inherited only
eight players who had been around for the majority of the McVie disaster. They
included forwards Shawn Bates, Aaron Downey, Cameron Mann, Joel Prpic, Randy
Robitaille and Landon Wilson, defenseman Bill Armstrong and goaltender John
Grahame.
Armstrong and Wilson were the lone
returnees from when Laviolette was still playing, though Armstrong would soon
put away his padding and focus solely on his new role as the assistant coach.
With that, there was little in the way of seasoning and internal familiarity
with the P-Bruins franchise on Laviolette’s roster.
He almost had another option toward that
in Tim Sweeney, who had played with Laviolette in all four of his years in
Providence. Sweeney led the team in scoring with forty-one goals and ninety-six
points when Laviolette captained it to the 1993 Northern Division title. And in
early October, he came back to the Bruins system after spending 1997-98 in the
Rangers organization.
But after eight days and two games, the
thirty-one-year-old Sweeney retired, leaving Laviolette to rely squarely on new
blood for a pinch of veteran presence on his bench. As much as youthful oomph
was needed to reignite this franchise and scratch the seven-year itch for the
fan base, a streak of seasoning was also needed the same way the representing athletes
needed a touch of protein to complement their carbo-loaded diet.
As Laviolette’s roster took shape, he and
Armstrong, both former rearguards in their own right, had decent measures of
experience on their defensive corps. The twenty-eight-year-old Terry Virtue had
been a longtime rival with the Worcester IceCats. Brandon Smith was a
fifth-year pro who had played the bulk of his career with the Adirondack Red
Wings. An early-season trade brought the blue line a third two-way talent in
Steve Bancroft, a twenty-seven-year-old coming off a Calder Cup Final run with
the Saint John Flames.
But for leadership, Laviolette would turn,
first and foremost, to stay-at-home defenseman Dennis Vaske. With Sweeney’s
return to Providence ending almost as soon as it began, and with Boston radio
analyst Bob Beers only managing ten regular-season games in his spare time,
Vaske would be the only player in his thirties to take part in the majority of
the Baby B’s 1998-99 schedule.
Laviolette’s distant successor as the
P-Bruins captain, and the first man to wear the “C” under his watch in his new
capacity, Vaske had a more poignant individual redemption narrative to pursue. He
had been a career-long Capital District and New York Islander for eight years
after spending four at the University of Minnesota-Duluth under New York’s
auspices. The 1993-94 and lockout-shortened 1994-95 campaigns were the first two
full NHL seasons for the 1986 second-round draftee.
Unfortunately, those would be his only two
start-to-finish seasons in The Show, as a concussive hit by Los Angeles Kings
enforcer Eric Lacroix in a November 22, 1995 game took long-lasting ill effects.
Lacroix had thrown a blindsided hit at Vaske, who was facing the wall at the
time. The force was enough to partially dislodge his helmet, and the exposed
portion of his head made contact with the dashers.
In a 2014 essay for Along the Boards, author Brian Sutch remembered witnessing the ugly hit and its aftermath
as a fourteen-year-old fan at Nassau Coliseum. Per Sutch’s account, “Vaske was
knocked unconscious, bleeding profusely from a gash above his left temple. He
remained motionless on the ice for several minutes, and did not regain
consciousness until he was roused by the team doctor in the dressing room. To a
kid in the 300 section, it seemed like an hour. I remember them cleaning the
blood off the ice.”
The open wound from the illegal check
required surgery on Vaske’s scalp. The closed wound left him momentarily
unconscious and feeling an array of unpleasant symptoms for weeks thereafter.
His 1995-96 season was cut down to nineteen games. Between that year and the
next two, he donned Islanders garb a mere fifty-five times before his
twelve-year association with the organization was done.
Vaske made his final appearance with
the Islanders on November 14, 1997, after which a return of concussion symptoms
terminated his season before Christmas for the third year in a row. Ten months
later, Boston signed him as a free agent, and he was assigned to Providence
when the season was a week old. Other than a nine-day, three-game call-up later
that fall, he spent the balance of the season lending his veteran presence to
Laviolette, who was not even three years his senior. He would suit up for
forty-three regular-season games, then all nineteen postseason contests.
The Bruins would be the second, and
final, organization to employ Vaske as a player, as his comeback bid would last
the one year. But few, if any, would have guessed that he could have logged
that much bonus action with this team, regardless of his own medical history.
No one could have scripted a culmination that would have had him placing a
locker-room hat on top of his scalp and being the first of his mates to life a
trophy over it.
The only way that was going to
happen would be if Vaske’s as-yet untapped leadership qualities, along with
Laviolette’s largely untested head-coaching mettle, could somehow combine with
a host of other variables and create the most epic single-season turnaround in
AHL history.
Any turnaround of any degree would be
welcomed after the Baby B’s had estranged their supporters through their
egregious showing in 1997-98. By mid-June, in a review of that campaign for
redress, Providence Journal sports
editor Art Martone all but impelled readers to look back on that and laugh. He
noted how the attendance on opening night, a Friday, clocked in at 6,213
people, and a mere 2,507 ticket sales were tallied for the next home game the
subsequent Sunday. In most years before and sense, opening night has attracted
a larger throng than those first two home dates of 1998-99 combined.
In his subsequent June recollection,
Martone hearkened back to how the P-Bruins set a decent tone by edging the
Falcons, 3-2, in the season’s icebreaker, but that one anonymous front-office
representative had said at the time, “I wish the score was about 7-1. We have
to get these people back.”
On the night in question, the Bruins had
nearly spoiled Laviolette’s debut in his new capacity by blowing a pair of
one-goal leads. Jay Henderson finally gave them a permanent edge, but they lost
their next two games in a home-and-home set with Hartford. Following the 6-4 loss
to the Wolf Pack before the crowd of 2,507 that Martone mentioned, Providence
dropped to 1-3-0 on the year with another setback at the Civic Center. Granted,
it was a 2-1 squeaker in favor of the defending champion Philadelphia Phantoms,
but this start was no way to foster fanfare.
That may have been one of the
motives for when, one month later, the organization broke its habit of
resisting the more gimmicky, stereotypically minor-league ploys that prickle
purists. A November 6 home date with Hershey, the AHL’s longest-tenured
franchise by a runaway, would witness the first-ever throwback event in
P-Bruins history. A little more than eleven years before the parent club
blended an assortment of its old uniforms for the 2010 NHL Winter Classic,
Providence did the same with its morgue of AHL apparel, as the Bruins wore
Rhode Island Reds-style jerseys while the visiting Bears donned one of their
retired schemes.
In fairness, while this was a rarity
in a time when this particular franchise eschewed alternate or one-off
uniforms, it was hardly the most gimmicky deed in the book. In fact,
reanimating the Reds brand while there was a Spoked-P smiling up from center
ice (and, at the time, a Spoked-B along with it) was the most emphatic means of
uniting the purist-dominated generations with the Generation Xers and
millennials. In any case, the off-ice personnel did what they set out to do by
drawing an audience much like the one that came to see the Baby B’s battle the
Bears in their first-ever home date six years earlier.
But ultimately, only wins on the ice would
win back the fans. Only a competitive club in the AHL standings would amount to
a competitive entity on the Downcity entertainment scene. The Bruins got a
decent start to that effect November 6, as the on-ice personnel ensured that
the quantity and quality of energy stayed all night. Providence prevailed in an
8-6 scorefest, with a hat trick by Bates piloting the home offense while Wilson
and Eric Nickulas tuned the mesh twice apiece.
With that result, the Bruins
improved to a mediocre 5-5-1-0, returning to the .500 mark for the second time
since opening weekend. At that point, they had still not boasted a winning
record since that opening-night escape past Springfield. But the unprecedented
carbonation of offense on that throwback night kept on for a while. Providence
ventured to Portland the next night and gagged the Pirates, 6-0. The next
weekend, it posted back-to-back five-goal performances, and by the end of a
seven-game winning streak, it had lit the lamp at least three times in each
contest. In between, John Grahame’s 5-0 shutout of Worcester on Veteran’s Day
pulled the Bruins into a tie for first in the New England Division.
No sooner did the winning streak end with
a 2-1 overtime loss to Springfield than the stick rack reheated on a
Thanksgiving Eve visit to Syracuse. The P-Bruins would garner national airtime
on both CNN and ESPN2 when they sculpted a whopping 10-1 lead in the first
period and paced themselves to a 14-2 victory. Randy Robitaille set a franchise
record with five goals on the night, plus two assists. Landon Wilson matched
Robitaille’s seven-point performance, including a hat trick, while Andre Savage
and Cameron Mann inserted two goals of their own in the record-setting first
period. Mann’s stick that tapped in the tenth tally went to the Hockey Hall of
Fame in Toronto.
The outcome of that game would foretell
the final makeup of the AHL standings from top to bottom. The 1998-99 Syracuse
Crunch succeeded the P-Bruins as the holders of the league’s worst record.
Conversely, these B’s were going places.
In just three weeks, Laviolette’s system
had sunk in, his core had coalesced and it all translated to a spike from
4-5-1-0 on the year to 12-5-1-1. Within another month, another rough patch
would double their count in the regulation loss column, but that ten would
remain a ten for seventeen games and forty-eight nights.
Beginning with a 3-2 overtime home loss to
the Hamilton Bulldogs on December 18, Laviolette’s pupils picked up a point in
seventeen consecutive contests. Beginning with their bounce-back effort to
fluster the Falcons, 4-1, on December 23, they reeled off eleven consecutive
victories. When that streak ended in a tie with Worcester, they proceeded to
win the following four, amounting to sixteen straight outings with no losses of
any kind and seventeen in a row with no regulation defeats.
That sugar rush finally crashed in
Chocolatetown, otherwise known as Hershey, when the host Bears slapped their
fellow AHL ursine squad with a 6-1 beatdown on January 30. But at that point,
Providence was twenty games above .500, would not look back and would not lose
consecutive regulation decisions for the balance of the regular season.
Meanwhile, Grahame — the son of former
Boston goalie Ron Grahame, whose claim to fame was being the export to the
Colorado Rockies in exchange for the draft pick the Bruins used to select Ray
Bourque — would put his name into the record book. His 3-2 decision over the
Beast of New Haven on March 5 was his eighteenth straight win, surpassing
former Albany River Rats backstop Mike Dunham. He added another victorious
decision to that string in Fredericton two nights later, 5-4.
One week after that, his skating mates
routed Springfield, 6-3, to give Providence home ice for the first three rounds
of the Calder Cup playoffs. The B’s had secured the best record in the Eastern
Conference with five weeks and thirteen games still to come in the regular
season.
To the surprise of few, if any, Laviolette
was conferred the Louis A.R. Pieri Award as the AHL’s coach of the year on
April 9. Robitaille was simultaneously declared the regular-season MVP, and in
the game that followed those ceremonies, the Bruins clinched the MacGregor Kilpatrick
Trophy, symbolic of the best record in the entire AHL, with a come-from-behind,
5-4 repression of the visiting Hartford Wolf Pack. Jeremy Brown and Peter
Ferraro both scored shorthanded goals that night.
Ferraro, who had spent most of the year in
Boston and would be the closest thing the forwards had to a grizzled veteran
for the playoffs, kept his hot hand going in Portland the next night with two
goals in a 4-3 win. The following day, he potted the Providence franchise’s
two-thousandth all-time goal to help finish the home-and-home sweep with an
identical 4-3 triumph.
While all of that was going on, the
Rochester Americans, who have long been second to Hershey among the
longest-living brands in the league, were winning a comparatively more dramatic
race to the top of the Western Conference. No teams in the East besides
Providence broke a triple-digit point tally, but the Amerks (111) outscored the
divisional rival River Rats (100) and the defending Calder Cup champion
Philadelphia Phantoms (105). Based on that, if everyone in the AHL brought
their A-game to the playoffs, a Bruins berth in the championship round would be
a fait accompli. But a less familiar and more battle-tested foe would likely
await them.
Ultimately, fifth-year league president
Dave Andrews got what he stopped short of admitting to be a dream matchup. The
Bruins shook off three barnacles from Worcester, Hartford and Fredericton to
represent the East. The Americans swept the Adirondack Red Wings, muzzled the
upset-minded Hamilton Bulldogs (who had stunned the River Rats in the first
round) and recovered from two straight home losses in the Western Conference
final to dethrone the Phantoms, four games to two.
With that, the 1999 Calder Cup Final — the
sixty-third series of its kind — essentially bore the equivalent of an NHL
Original Six matchup in a Stanley Cup Final. Two cities with storied AHL
chronicles were in play, Rochester being a member for forty-three years at the
time and Providence for fifty-eight nonconsecutive campaigns. And as the class
of the conferences and the two biggest point collectors from that winter, the
P-Bruins and Americans were plainly at their best.
When it was over, the Providence Journal’s Bob Dick would quote Andrews as saying, “There
are some historical cities around our league that are very important to us.
Providence is one of those cities, as is Rochester and Hershey. We feel they
are very important for our league, and they need to be successful for us, as a
league, to have a good year. When one of those cities struggles, it’s bad for
our league.”
Once again, those with any stake in the
matter could look back on the prior Providence campaign and laugh. More
broadly, the urge to keep the classic cities relevant was yielding happy
returns in Andrews’ young tenure. The Amerks had just won the Calder Cup in
1996, then were succeeded by the Bears the next season. Philadelphia won it in
1998, all the while proving the minor league could survive in a major-league
market, let alone in the NHL parent club’s former building.
But having Providence involved in tandem
with Rochester had unique dimensions. For all of their history at this stage with
other time-honored AHL cities, the two markets had never previously met in the
Calder Cup championship series. In fact, the old Reds won their last Cup in the
spring of 1956, six months before the Amerks debuted.
There had, however, been no shortage of
memorable Reds-Americans and Bruins-Americans moments, albeit mostly in the
regular season. And with the new Providence franchise, there was a slight sense
of an old guard welcoming the new kid on the block by the time the 1999 final
rolled around. The timing was helped by the fact that Rochester’s parent club,
the Buffalo Sabres, were on their way to the Stanley Cup Final after knocking
off Boston, a longtime Adams and Northeast Division rival, in the second round.
Moreover, Rochester and Rhode Island had a
unique common bond in the broader annals of Triple-A sports. In 1981, the
Pawtucket Red Sox had edged the Rochester Red Wings, 3-2, in professional
baseball’s longest game, one that took thirty-three innings and a two-month
suspension after curfew kicked in to complete.
In the nineties, the PawSox and Red Wings
both enjoyed generous television coverage on the New England Sports Network and
Empire Sports Network, respectively. The same was true for the P-Bruins and
Amerks, whose respective parent clubs partially owned those channels. So
naturally, this series would have plenty of coverage to do it justice in every
medium.
Back at ice level, the connections
continued and made no effort to hide from the beginning. Veteran forward Steve
King, an East Greenwich native and Brown University graduate, had initially
thought his career was over after splitting the 1997-98 campaign with the
Americans and the IHL’s Cincinnati Cyclones. Residual shoulder ailments
subsequently sidelined him for the better part of 1998-99.
But Providence brought him back home and
back to the ice for three regular-season games, then dressed him for the most
vital and climactic phases of its playoff run. And in his first bout with his
previous AHL employer, he beat old friend Martin Biron twice to spell the
difference in a 4-2 Game 1 victory before 11,306 rooters the Civic Center on
Saturday, June 5.
In accordance with the paper-based
prophecies, which forecast a series of parity, the Bruins never led by more
than two goals until Peter Ferraro fed an empty net with 5.2 seconds to spare. And
amidst the quick turnaround ahead of Game 2 on Sunday, June 6, the Rhode Island
faithful broke a bigger sweat when key cog Eric Nickulas incurred a suspension
for his hit from behind on Rochester rearguard Alexandre Boikov.
Given the way Game 1 had confirmed the
titanic appearance of the matchup going in, deleting a player of that caliber
could make a crucial difference. And this was Rochester’s best chance to steal
a game from the Civic Center, which it would inevitably need to do if it wanted
to put that dramatic, last-minute damper on the P-Bruins’ yearlong epic narrative.
Instead, in defense of the upper hand, the
momentum and a perfect home playoff record, young Laviolette flexed more of his
precocious team-management caliber. With Nickulas out of the picture, he made
the requisite adjustments and offered whatever pregame pep he might have deemed
necessary. Although, with a respectably sized Sunday-night audience of 8,269
urging them on, his pupils likely did not need much more motivation.
They reaffirmed that reality when they
scorched Biron for three goals before the ten-minute mark of the opening frame.
Biron and his backup, Tom Draper, split the tab on six goals against while
repelling a mere nineteen of twenty-five total Bruins shots. At the other end,
Grahame halted all twenty-seven stabs to post his fiftieth combined
regular-season and playoff win of the campaign.
Laviolette would insist to the on-site
press corps that the 6-0 smackdown still did not betray the presence of two
Cyclopean squadrons. Although, any objective observer who needed no caution in
their assessment could say that Providence had the runaway intangible advantage
with the way it buried its chances when they came, left no seams unattended and
kept percolating the moment when it was there and sustaining its symbiotic
relationship with the crowd.
With all of that said, the change of venue
to Rochester’s Blue Cross Arena on Wednesday, June 9, smooshed the score back
to a more logical margin. Precisely two weeks before the eighteenth anniversary
of the thirty-third inning at McCoy Stadium, Biron and Grahame waged a
best-of-five staring contest that would spill into a third overtime.
Along the way, back from his one-game ban,
Nickulas brooked an injury after colliding with none other than Boikov. In
addition, two-way connoisseur Terry Virtue sustained his own ailment in the
second regulation stanza. Virtue’s withdrawal meant Providence was down to five
defensemen to rotate in front of Grahame for what would be three more
full-length periods, most of which carried the connotations of the next goal
either spelling a commanding 3-0 series lead or a whole new narrative.
By the start of sudden-death, Grahame had
allowed four equalizers, but still had yet to surrender a lead in the series.
He would not let it happen in the fourth or fifth full-length stanza, when his
mates would not have a chance to recompense before hitting the showers. But the
refocused Biron was equally sharp at that time. He denied Joel Prpic’s
breakaway bid, along with thirteen other Providence shots, in the first
overtime. He caught a break in the next period when an intended whistle negated
Antti Laaksonen’s would-be winner.
Finally, in the opening minute of the sixth
period, the Amerk-turned-Bruin reheated his hot hand in his old haunts. King
camped himself in front of Biron while often-unsung captain Dennis Vaske, a fellow
American-born college graduate whose playing days were in its last throes
amidst a one-year revival in Providence, halted a Rochester clearing attempt at
the center point.
King tipped Vaske’s low-flying shot to the
ice, where it skipped beneath Biron’s trapper mitt like a tricky chopper up the
infield. With that, the Bruins had their chance to deceptively sweep the
Americans the same way they had done to the Wolf Pack two rounds prior.
It wouldn’t happen. Rochester belatedly
recovered and regrouped in Game 4, drawing first blood for the first time in the
series in the ever-momentous final minute of the first period. In a pattern
that resembled Games 1 and 3, but in reversed roles, the Bruins — still missing
Nickulas up front and Virtue on their backline — would muster a pair of
equalizers before the host Amerks broke away for good, taking a 4-2 decision
and forcing Game 5 back at the Civic Center.
Rochester’s Craig Fisher, who had tallied
that crucial first goal, summed up the situation best when he spoke with
reporters afterward. As quoted by Bob Dick in the Providence Journal, Fisher said, “We have a lot of pride and
tradition. Going to Providence isn’t the best place in the world to play. We
dug ourselves this hole. It’s our first win over these guys. We definitely feel
we can go into Providence and come away with a win.”
For Laviolette, the businesslike bench
boss at the other end, there was no bright side to the losing cause. Only
laments over missed opportunities to put the Americans away, especially in the
game’s young stages and during various special-teams segments when it was still
anyone’s contest.
But poetically, this was perfect. After
all, while Rochester was going to need four mulligans to satisfy the pride and
tradition Fisher alluded to, the Providence franchise was in a perfect position
to reprise its own second-chance motif yet again. And giving one game away to
the opposition was the only way to set the table for crowning moment in the
Bear Den, the venue Fisher and company openly dreaded.
And so, on the Saturday between Games 4
and 5, the number of available tickets for Sunday night’s tilt melted like a
snowflake in the springtime stratosphere. With the faceoff slated for the
traditional Friday start time of five minutes after seven o’clock, there was
just that much more time for buildup in and around Downcity. It got to a point
where desperate wannabe attendees were reportedly seeking and finding scalpers.
One way or another, all 11,909 seats at
the Civic Center were filled with black-and-gold jerseys, face paint, pompoms
and puck-shaped novelty hats. Some spectators went one or two extra miles with Boston
Bruins novelty bear claws in lieu of generic-looking foam fingers. Others
brought makeshift tinfoil Calder Cup replicas the same way their NHL
counterparts did to get their faces on the “Cup Crazy” ads of the day.
Longtime Boston anthem singer Rene
Rancourt, who had been here and at other smaller New England arenas on numerous
prior occasions, performed the Star-Spangled
Banner, but upon finishing briefly delayed his trademark Randy Burridge
fist-pump imitation to hold out his unclenched free hand and gape in admiration
of the audience’s enthusiasm. NESN play-by-play announcer Tom Caron speculated
that Rancourt had a momentary flashback to the old Garden, demolished the
previous year and the site of the last championship game for any Bruins team at
the other bookend of the decade (1990’s Stanley Cup-clinching loss to Edmonton).
In a minor-league hockey boom that defined
the nineties as a particularly solid era for the sport, this pattern had
happened in other markets. Over in the IHL, the Detroit Vipers and Chicago
Wolves were both launched in 1994, then won their first Turner Cup titles in
succession on home ice in 1997 and 1998. The AHL’s Portland Pirates had won the
Calder Cup as a first-year expansion club in 1993-94, corralling their crown in
front of their supporters as well.
In every case, there were those who were
bound to compare the anticipation of the clincher to that of the team’s opening
night in the inaugural season. There was every cause to draw the same parallels
in Providence. This was the second coming of October 16, 1992, when Providence
punctuated its second chance to make it as an AHL. And following Game 4’s
letdown, it was the second chance for the men in uniform to take the team and
the fan base’s love affair to the next level with a championship.
Even as the clear-cut top dog on the
cusp of a crown, the P-Bruins kept up with that second-chance theme. Each of
the first three goals of Game 5 involved a Bruin burying a rebound behind Biron.
In the sixth minute of the contest, while Rochester’s Randy Cunneyworth served
a penalty for high-sticking, Nickulas tried to assert his return after missing
Game 4 due to injury by cutting in from the right corner to sweep a loose puck
from the porch through the five-hole.
Biron would close the opening with his pads
in time to deny Nickulas. But Landon Wilson, a third-year veteran of the
organization, caught the rebound along the right inner hash marks and lobbed it
home himself.
Twelve minutes later, Prpic, who had
barely missed being the overtime hero in Game 3, absorbed Marquis Mathieu’s
feed from behind the goal line. All alone with Biron once again, he tucked home
his own rebound.
Providence 2, Rochester 0.
Peter Ferraro incurred the P-Bruins’ third
solo penalty of the night for interference with forty seconds left in the
stanza. Carrying over the final two-third of their power play to a fresh sheet
and a shorter change from their bench to John Grahame’s net, the Americans had
as tantalizing and crucial a chance to restart their suppressed engines as
ever. But Grahame and Biron alike were seamless for the first thirteen minutes
of the second period.
That changed when the two linemates who
had polished the second scoring play traded roles on the third, with Mathieu
stashing the remnants of Prpic’s bid. The resultant 3-0 difference held up for
the second intermission.
Rochester’s Dean Melanson and the Bruins’
Ferraro took turns tallying seventeen seconds apart in the closing frame. Melanson
had stepped out of the box following a roughing penalty, absorbed Mike Harder’s
long-range pass and beat Grahame on a break. But Ferraro was just as apt to
carry Jeremy Brown’s feed home with 10:42 to spare in regulation. Afterwards,
Grahame and Biron were perfect again, which meant Prpic would soon have his
big, memorable game-winning goal after his near-miss in Game 3’s overtime.
As the 4-1 margin on the scoreboard
held up through public-address announcer Dave Zibelli’s “last minute of play”
warning, Caron invited the viewers at home to “Sit back and enjoy it, as the
Bruins skate to the Cup.” The subsequent silence from the booth was implicitly
meant to last longer than three seconds, but Caron broke it at that point to
declare Cameron Mann’s facile tap into an empty net “The icing on the cake!”
Prpic garnered the primary assist on
the play for his third point of the night. Credit for the secondary helper went
to none other than Vaske, the resilient captain whose zeal had translated to two
hooking penalties earlier in the night. With the assist on the final goal of
the season, his last scoresheet entry in competitive hockey would represent his
shining takeoff into the sunset, as he would soon claim the Calder Cup from
presenting league president Dave Andrews.
Amidst the added adulation from the
audience and tougher-to-bottle energy on the home bench, it would be another full
minute between Mann’s goal and the next draw, the final faceoff of the season.
At that drop of the puck, Caron spoke back up to formally restate the obvious.
Not to be outdone in that department, color partner Bob Norton issued one last
reminder that the city last celebrated an AHL title via the Reds in 1956.
The announcers then went back to their
original plan of allowing the masses to tell the final paragraph of the story.
They did so for the last twenty seconds of the game and the first full minute
after the horn. With the jubilant players packed in the right corner of the
P-Bruins zone and euphoric fans carrying on, Caron finally chimed back in to
say, “It’s divine Providence here in Rhode Island.”
Over in the home team’s radio booth,
native son Dave Goucher was patently and understandably more energized. And per
the nature of his medium, he had the task of painting the picture for those in
his market who either lacked or eschewed the benefit of seeing the scene for
themselves. While Caron, who had called his own home state’s triumph with the
1994 Portland Pirates, was quiet to conclude the anticipatory phase, Goucher
exclaimed at the final second of play, “This incredible season is complete, as
the Bruins come flying over the boards to mob John Grahame! They are the 1999
Calder Cup champions!”
Twelve years and two nights later, now
with one of those 1999 Calder Cup champions, Bob Beers, as his color
complement, Goucher’s evolution was measured in his more distinctive turn of
phrase, “Get the Duck Boats ready!” when he relayed the news of Boston’s
Stanley Cup clincher in Game 7 of the 2011 final in Vancouver. It was only his
second opportunity to immortalize a moment of that nature, and a clever
reference to Boston’s choice of transportation for what have been many
twenty-first century championship parades.
But for him, and many locals will
argue for the New England sports fan base in general, it all started here with
the 1998-99 P-Bruins.
Citywide renaissance for Providence
aside, the region’s sports scene had brooked a dry decade in the nineties.
During that decade, only two of the four major-league teams in the Boston area
came within smelling distance of a championship. In those two cases, the Bruins
were outclassed in the 1990 Stanley Cup Final and the Patriots in Super Bowl
XXXI by Mark Messier’s Oilers and Brett Favre’s Packers, respectively. The Red
Sox would win a playoff series later in 1999, only to fall flat in five games
against the dynastic Yankees in the second round. And the Celtics were
uncharacteristically irrelevant after winning what had been the market’s
unmatched sixteenth NBA playoff title in 1986.
As far as pro or otherwise fairly
high-profile sports went, mere pockets of New England had the only moments of
genuine glory in the nineties. Those moments came via college or minor-league
hockey. The Springfield Indians claimed back-to-back Calder Cups in 1991 and
1992. The Portland Pirates turned heads by winning the same trophy as a
first-year franchise in 1994. The University of Maine won the NCAA men’s title
in 1993 and 1999. Boston University did the same when the event was held at the
Providence Civic Center in 1995.
But those college programs could not
generate any glee outside of their campuses, beyond maybe a few Hockey East
zealots who could politely applaud them out of regional pride. As for the
Indians and Pirates, they were variously partnering with the New York
Islanders, Hartford Whalers (otherwise known as the Bruins’ little brother) and
Washington Capitals at the time of their titles.
No team within New England and with
direct ties to a major professional Boston team had done anything in the decade
until the very end via the 1998-99 P-Bruins. That was the difference, and it
showed the most among those who were too young to remember Larry Bird’s last
run to a ring on the old Garden parquet.
The morning after the Calder Cup
clincher, the Providence Journal
sports section was rife with various big-name bylines dedicating their ink to
the Bruins. One of them, columnist Bill Parrillo, had caught up with city
resident Matt Lavoie, who was fourteen at the time, ahead of the faceoff.
Lavoie would have been no older than one going on two when the Celtics last
raised a banner, and the Boston Bruins’ Stanley Cup drought, dating back to
1972, was nearly twice his age at that point.
Lavoie, who was hanging around with
a peer taking his chances on snagging a coveted pair of tickets, simply told
Parrillo, “This is the closest I’ve come to a championship. I’d love to be able
to see it.”
Being an at-large New England fan at
the higher levels, Lavoie and those of his generation would soon see plenty
after seeing nothing. And as Rhode Islanders would argue, it really began with
Boston’s hockey farm team right in their own state capital.
The dry decade got its splash of champagne
and beer, courtesy of the raucous P-Bruins dressing room, on June 13, 1999. And
since then, the new millennium has seen Boston and New England fans wait no
longer than three years at a time between titles. What’s more is that there
have been jutting Ocean State ties to every victorious organization in their
twenty-first century triumphs.
On February 3, 2002, the Patriots
nabbed their first of five Super Bowl trophies in a sixteen-season stretch. At
the time, they were still conducting their training camp at Bryant College in
North Smithfield, Rhode Island. They have since moved to their in-season home
at Patriot Place and Gillette Stadium, which opened in the autumn of 2002. But
as locals never get tired of reminding everyone, that venue in Foxborough,
Massachusetts is actually a shorter drive to Providence than it is to Boston.
The Pats won another Lombardi Trophy
in 2004, then another in 2005. In between, the Red Sox canned the Curse of the
Bambino, which naturally also entailed winning the franchise’s first World
Series to feature homegrown talent from Pawtucket, its Triple-A base since 1973.
Instead of another eighty-six years,
it would be three more before the Sox claimed another Commissioner’s Trophy,
then another six before their next title in 2013. Eight months after that second
of three Sox victories, the Celtics ended their 22-year banner drought in 2008
under club president Rick Gotham, who had graduated from Providence College the
year of the team’s previous crown.
And then there were the 2011 Boston
Bruins, whose Game 7 upset of the Vancouver Canucks saw one former P-Bruin, Tim
Thomas, pitch the shutout on thirty-seven saves. Another two Providence
products, linemates Patrice Bergeron and Brad Marchand, tallied two goals
apiece to account for all of the night’s offense. First-line center David
Krejci, the NHL’s playoff scoring leader, defensemen Johnny Boychuk and Adam
McQuaid and backup goalie Tuukka Rask were also Spoked-P alumni. Together, they
were the first seven of their kind to get their names engraved on the Stanley
Cup as members of the Spoked-B fraternity.
And so, however directly or
indirectly, it really did start here.
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