More Proselytizing, Coz It's What We DO At This Time o' Year

From an article in the Chicago Tribune...

"Everyone who picks up a stick and puts on skates one day wants to place the Stanley Cup over their head," said Philip Pritchard, curator of the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. "It's a lot bigger than the game itself. It's an icon of the sport. It's the pinnacle of everything they do."

This isn't the case in America's three other major sports: football, baseball and basketball. (No offense, soccer.)

"It's easy to say if you're a hockey player that I want to win the Stanley Cup, but you don't hear many football players say they want to win the Lombardi Trophy," said Richard Davies, author of "Sports in American Life: A History." "'I want to win the Super Bowl' is what you hear them say. Or, 'I want to win a ring.'"

[...]

"I think of the World Series trophy and the Lombardi Trophy as something that's really part of the TV age, a part of the birth of televised sports," said Anne Madarasz, director of the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum. "Both those trophies came in 1967, the beginning of the Super Bowl era. They were created to give people a reason to watch these contests, developing and driving the commercialization of sports."

The Stanley Cup also acts as a historical document, with the names of every player from the winning teams engraved in rings that stack up under the crowning bowl.

RTWT, as we citizen journalists and hockey evangelists say.  You prolly won't learn anything new if you're a die-hard fan (you will, if'n you're a newbie), but it IS a good read.

The Cup might could be awarded tonight... but let's hope not.  I wanna see one more game and I wanna see those Broons take it all.