Nick's Café Canadien

Let it be known through all the kingdom that the Calgary Flames destroyed the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals. One could say Tampa discovered, the hard way, the truth behind a rather clever anagram that was passed on to me this weekend, which appears to have originated from a Vancouver Canucks newsgroup: rearrange the letters in “Ville Nieminen” to get “evil men in line.”

The real irony of it all is that for perhaps the first time ever, it’s election season, and everybody in Calgary is proudly wearing red.

Tonight I went to see Game 6 of the Western Conference Final matchup between the Sharks and the Flames, taking a seat almost directly three rows behind the official scorer on the Sharks’ end (or the Flames’ end in the second period). Unfortunately, my camera just missed the puck that slid all the way down the ice into the empty San José net with less than a second remaining in the third, but that would have been the icing on another layer of icing on the cake anyway.

It was a game of compromises. On one hand, it thankfully did not go into overtime. On the other, Martin Gelinas still scored the eliminating goal. On one hand, the Sharks actually scored. On the other, they still got a sound whipping.

All of you out there who tried to convince me to take up a summer job somewhere more interesting than Calgary: this summer – well, every summer, but this one in particular – there is nowhere more interesting than Calgary.

So yeah: I got to see the Campbell Bowl presented live, the Saddledome’s getting another banner, the Flames are going to the Stanley Cup Finals – and I have yet to finish my apologetic penance for losing faith in my hometown team and making fun of them all these years. It looks like hell is three-quarters of the way to freezing over, and we all know what that means: perfect hockey weather.

I’ll be back for breakfast – that is, when the Calgary Flames feast on a plate of Wings.

The last time Calgary made it past the first round, the Berlin Wall was standing, cell phones were novelty items the size of bricks, and I held a British passport.

The rest of the Stanley Cup playoffs have a lot to live up to, because this series has had every form of high drama conceivable in a sport – a 4-0 sweep, a near-comeback against a four-goal deficit resulting in three overtimes, and a Game 7 sudden-death fight to the finish after a third-period goal with five seconds on the clock – but with my hometown team coming out on top. That was fun.

It’s been a long time in the making, but the Calgary Flames have finally won a playoff game. Watching the Flames not only play a game in the month of April, but emerge victorious, is both surreal and unfamiliar. In a sense, there is something nostalgic about cheering for the red and white and not feeling embarrassed about it afterwards. In another, there is a bit of disappointment in no longer justifiably being a hockey geezer making fun of his own city in the name of the good ol’ days, or not knowing who any of these new guys are. When Vancouver seems like an old team by comparison – you mean Linden is still in the NHL? – it can be safely dubbed a problem. At least there aren’t any Bures around to spoil our fun this year.

The dichotomy presented by Games 1 and 2 of the Flames-Canucks series is this: if you don’t kill penalties, you don’t win. Lest I make an inverse error by saying that killing penalties is a sure path to victory, I will only posit that it follows the contrapositive is true: if you won a game, you probably killed some penalties. Case study: tonight’s 2-1 victory. Good job, Flames.

Assigned reading this week: Ross Prusakowski, last year’s resident Calgarian sportswriter for The Gateway not named Joel Chury, will doubtless have a few words to say.