O! The hubris of the sports fanatic!
Ten years ago this week Pittsburgh hockey fans took to the streets around Pittsburgh Paints Arena hoisting painted-silver, duct-taped, and tinfoil-wrapped constructions of serving bowls, coffee cans, five-gallon buckets, and—in at least one case—a never-returned-to-the-distributor beer keg signed by every member of the young fan’s friends and family. Uptown, the jubilation was overflowing.
The occasion was the celebration of the Pittsburgh Penguins 2017 Stanley Cup championship. The Pens beat the Nashville Predators in six games to retain possession of Lord Stanley’s (original) Cup for another year.
That’s because just twelve months earlier we’d gone through the same thing and Pittsburgh Orbit was there to capture the excitement—and weirdo facsimiles of the Stanley Cup trophy—at 2016’s parade downtown. The pattern established, we had every reason to believe it would go on forever.
Spoiler alert: it didn’t. The Penguins have not made it back to the Stanley Cup finals in the intervening ten years. To add insult to injury, winners in that span have increasingly come from such un-hockey—or at least un-winter weather—Sun Belt locales as Washington, DC, both Tampa Bay and the rest of Florida, and Las Vegas.
The moment came and went without even a follow-up story from this web site. Yes, that is shameful and something we’ll have to take to the grave.
This week, though, the whole thing came back and lazy Orbit staff got off their keisters to right this particular wrong, a decade in the making. Here are our collected photos of DIY Stanley Cups from way back in 2017.
Hats off to the (North) Carolina Hurricanes, this year’s National Hockey League champions. May the streets around The Lenovo Center in Raleigh be littered with scraps of tin foil as families search in vain for that missing salad bowl they’d swear was right here just last week.
Pittsburgh Orbit 