Expeditious Culture

The Vancouver Canucks are down three goals at the second intermission. Chances are good they aren’t going to score three times in the next twenty minutes (they haven’t scored once in the previous forty) and that means the Boston Bruins are going to leave Canada with the Stanley Cup.

The major theme of the pre-game show for Game Seven of the Stanley Cup Finals was that this was the game these players had dreamed about since they were kids. In fact, they’d done more than dreamed it, they’d played it already, countless times, in driveways and backyard rinks.

Young Robert Luongo could not have imagined the game going this way. The Vancouver goalie, ultimately, is going to go down as the one responsible for each of those goals. Forget about the three forwards and two defensemen in front of him, because everyone else is going to. This failure is going to be on Luongo’s shoulders.

More than any other sport, hockey revolves around the performance of one person. In baseball, you can pull a pitcher after six innings and turn the game over to your bullpen. In hockey, letting your goalie make the walk of shame from his crease back to the bench means that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

You don’t have to be perfect, though, especially in game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals. No one’s going to begrudge you three goals… as long as the masked man at the other end of the ice has let four pucks past him.

Luongo isn’t as lucky. Tim Thomas is at the other end of the sheet, and he’s been perfect up to this point. When you’re up against perfection, it turns out you need to be perfect also.

As the NBC crew wraps up the intermission report, they’re not talking about Luongo. They’re talking about Mark Pritchard, the man in white gloves polishing the Stanley Cup. In twenty minutes, he’ll walk the cup onto the ice and join NHL Comisiioner Gary Bettman in presenting the oldest trophy in professional sports to someone wearing white, black and gold.

Luongo’s a hockey player, so he will have stayed out on the ice while the Bruins celebrated their win, then skated through the handshake line with the rest of his team, congratulating the victors and then getting the hell out of there.

With nineteen minutes left in the third, Luongo’s already lost this game.

He didn’t have to be perfect. Except that tonight, he did.