Issue #274 Taking One for The Team
Canadians coming together in a backwoods bar creates a special Stanley Cup memory for the room.
More often than not when heading out on a trip, you don’t know which moment is going to be the highlight. That was the case recently when a few friends and I made my first long ride of the season, a quick two-day jaunt south of BC into the state of Washington to find a little sunshine that has been so conspicuously absent across the country this spring.
The ride took us through the Cascade Mountains and into a tiny town that is so in the middle of nowhere it cannot be approached on the same road during the winter. The roads were great, my BMW R1200GS was great and even the weather was cooperating. The ride could be interrupted by only one thing. A rainburst, right? Wrong. The ride did indeed go on pause, but not because of weather. Rather, for a hockey game. To be precise: game five of the NHL’s Stanley Cup finals between the Boston Bruins and Vancouver Canucks. This was at a time in the best-of-seven series when Canuck fans were beginning to feel a little uneasy about their team’s prospects but were still hopeful the boys could pull it off and bring Lord Stanley’s cup home to Canada for the first time since 1993.
Riding into town minutes before the puck was scheduled to drop, one of my companions ran to the bar on one side of the street while the other went to source our lodgings for the night. Companion Number One struck paydirt first. “The game’s on the big screen in there,” he came back from the bar to report. “There’s a guy in there from Vancouver and another from Powell River. They just rode in and we can sit with them ...”
The two riders from BC were on the last day of a longer trip. They worked their schedule to coincide with the progression of the series. So, they’d ride each day until the start of the game, then find a bar to watch.
So far, their plan had worked. Which is pretty amazing. Finding a bar wouldn’t have been the problem. But finding one in the United States that also had hockey on the screen would have been a challenge the further they got from the 49th parallel.
But it had worked out, and here they were watching game five surrounded by a bunch of fellow Canadians in a bar that had probably never experienced so much cheering for a hockey game—with the possible exception of the 1980 Olympics.
It was a motorcycle moment. It was a hockey moment. That combines two of the most enjoyable pastimes a Canadian can have. The fact that it took place in a small bar in the middle of nowhere in a country that has only very minor pockets of enthusiasm for hockey (no matter what NHL commissioner Gary Bettman may have to say on that score) made it that much more enjoyable. The bar was filled with Canadians and most of them were riders as a group of 10 we had seen earlier in the day joined the audience. Others were tourists from the US who had to wonder what on earth was going on. Maybe the scene would have been the same the next night for the NBA playoff game between the Miami Heat and the Dallas Mavericks, but it was that particular hockey game that mattered. Of course it helps that the Canucks won the game in nail-biting fashion.
Sadly, we now know the outcome of those finals and the resulting mayhem in Vancouver which unfortunately put a damper on the entire run. But I still have that Game five moment to remember—it made the entire 2011 playoffs a success for me. Sure, it would have been great to see a Canadian team hoisting the cup again, but that will happen some day. Winnipeg anyone? I’ll find another hole-in-the-wall to watch that one as well. Hope it isn’t another 18 years.
