Twenty Years

Twenty years sounds like a long time ago.....Yet it went by in a flash...Twenty years ago Forrest Gump came out...Along with Ace Ventura, Reality Bites, Dumb & Dumber, Pulp Fiction, and The Santa Clause...

Portishead's album Dummy came out 20 years ago...So did Weezer, by Weezer, Dookie by Green Day, Under the Table and Dreaming by DMB, Pearl Jam's Vitalogy, and Jeff Buckley's Grace...

Twenty years ago O.J. Simpson was arrested for double murder...

Twenty years ago, Major League Baseball had a lockout/strike that killed any chance of an amazing Cleveland Indians versus Montreal Expos World Series...

Twenty years ago, I graduated from high school...

And the highlight of 1994...The New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup!

After suffering my first 18 years of life as a Rangers fan, I saw a winner...And lets be honest, I was seeing any winning growing up in Cleveland for a long time...It had been 54 years since the Rangers had won the Cup, so as for being a long suffering Rangers fan...I had some catching up to do...But since 1994, the Rangers haven't been back to the Stanley Cup Finals...Hell, they've barely even sniffed the Finals since then...But here we are, twenty years later, and the Rangers are going back to the Stanley Cup Finals...

The Rangers will face the LA Kings...The LA Kings and the NY Rangers...The Marketing department's dicks are so hard right now...The Kings are good...Their Goalie, Jonathan Quick can go toe-toe with Lundqvist...They skate well...They're fast...Plenty of talent all over the ice...I'll be honest...I'm nervous...I have doubts...But that's nothing new....

 I didn't have a lot of faith in this team for much of the season...Early on, they seemed to struggle with adjusting to a new coaching staff, and system...They didn't seem as tough, physically, even though it was mostly the same team as the year before...But Henrik Lundqvist can always carry the team through a rough patch...Oh, wait...The he started out slow...His game even seemed off...But it came around...Slowly other pieces came around...But the offense was often lacking...

At the trade deadline, the Rangers traded their captain, Ryan Callahan to Tampa Bay for their Captain, Martin St. Louis...I hated this trade...St. Louis was 8 years older...Not a physical presence...And seemed like a bitch demanding trade after not getting selected by his GM to be on Team Canada's Olympic hockey team...And demanding to only go to the Rangers...Yet, the Rangers overpaid, giving up a 1st and 2nd rounder, plus Callahan...

Then St. Louis went 11 games without scoring a goal...While Callahan continued to play his steady, two-way game in Tampa Bay...I HATED this trade...Then came the playoffs...St. Louis' mother suddenly passes away...He seems to be playing on another level...Multiple, huge Game changing/winning goals...The rest of the team is feeding off of it...Now we sit here, heading into the finals...Looks like a good trade now...

I still HATE it!

Yes, I'm thrilled the Rangers are playing for the Stanley Cup...But there is a part of me that feels like it's screwed up that Callahan isn't there...Along with Lundqvist, he was the face of the Rangers...He was home grown...He played Ranger hockey, the way it's suppose to be played...But sports is a business right...Yes, yes it is...And the Rangers decided to make a move for business now, and risk some of the future...2 high draft picks and the captain, for an aging scorer who has one last push left in him...

Big picture, I still think its a bad trade...

But do I really want to wait another year or twenty?

The Beeze.