Sabres Eulogy

[SCSabresFan!]

Scott Jagow is on NPR - morning drive in LA. He wrote this after we lost in the ECF. Hope you enjoy.

 

 

 

 

This season was one of my favorites as a Buffalo fan, so I wrote this as a way to remember it:

 

Seasons come and go. Winter, spring, fall. Baseball, football, basketball. But this hockey season is one I?ll never forget.

 

They were picked to finish dead last. A team of nobodies makin? nothin?. The season before, the Sabres were bankrupt, skating on the thinnest of ice, possibly gone for good. So when they started off this year with a few wins, hardly anyone glanced in their direction. Surely, the losing would start soon, like it had so many times before.

 

But it didn?t happen. They kept winning, and kept winning. Without their best goalie. Without this player and that player. Against the mightier teams with superstars and fat contracts. And by the time the playoffs began, the Buffalo Sabres were the most breathtaking team in the league to watch. They played a beautiful game of speed and precision, of guts and desire. They were the definition of a team, and they were practically unbeatable.

 

Apparently, though, the hockey gods had seen enough. After all, this was Buffalo, the city without a trophy. The Charlie Brown of Sports Towns. In Buffalo, Lucy always yanks the football away at the last second. Always.

 

One Sabre after another got injured. First, a top scorer was lost to a brain-rattling concussion. Then, one of the best defensemen went down. Then another. Then another. And on the morning of Game 7 against the Carolina Hurricanes, about the only good starting defensemen left was hit with a rare Staph infection.

 

Throughout all of it, this team never gave up, never winced or complained or made excuses. The Sabres scored an astonishing 11 goals in the last minute of a period during the playoffs. They won 5 of 6 overtime games. 14 of 18 games were decided by one goal. In one contest against Ottawa, they came back 5 TIMES to tie the score before winning in OT.

 

Then, in Game 7, they scored with 3 seconds left in the second period to go up 2-1 against the far more experienced and healthy Hurricanes. Despite fielding a minor league defense (which included one guy who never even PLAYED an NHL game), the Sabres were 20 minutes away from a trip to the Stanley Cup finals. I, and my fellow Sabres fans, were on the verge of tears ... and perhaps coronaries ... when the third period started. We shouted, ?LET?S GO BUFFALO,? the deafening chant that shook our home arena so many times during this improbable run.

 

Despite going down 3-2 in the third, we all fought to the bitter end.

And it was bitter. One of the Canes' goals bounced off three players before it went in. The Sabres had nothing left in tank, not even a scrap of luck. And so, it all ended.

 

But as deeply as this loss hurt, I have never been prouder to be a Buffalo fan. This team made me - and a lot of other people - believe in things like magic and guts and pure will and pouring out your heart and soul until there's nothing left. Things that shouldn?t be confined to a rink, a piece of rubber and some L-shaped sticks. Things that oughta happen more in real life.

 

Had we been healthy, I have no doubt we would've won the Stanley Cup.

But we'll never know. Because the guy everyone pulls for? doesn't always get the girl. And Buffalo doesn?t win sports championships.

 

I remember balling my eyes out when I was 10 years old after the Bills lost (in the final minutes) the first playoff game of my life. Little did I know, I?d still be crying when I was 35. Little did I know, I was signing up for a quarter-century (or let's face it, probably a lifetime) of playoff tears.

And so when a fellow fan told me last night that his 8-year boy cried himself to sleep after the Sabres lost? I was crushed. He said he hugged him and thought, why did I do this to my son? How could I open the door to this?

 

I told him what life as a Buffalo fan has meant to me:

 

Yes, the endless failures have dented my faith over and over, to the point of almost destroying my childish annual optimism in favor of grumpy old cynicism and disgust. I?ve seen it happen to many a Buffalo fan. My father, for one. Though, even HE couldn?t escape the magic of this season.

 

I said "ALMOST destroyed." Even after Wide Right, The No Goal Skate in the Crease, the Lemieux Slap-Stick Goal, The Ronnie Harmon Dropped Touchdown, The Delay of Game on 4th Down, the Music City Miracle, and the other wretched Buffalo sports catastrophes, I still poured my heart into this season. Cautiously at first, but then fearlessly. So many Buffalo fans did. We thought ? no, we KNEW, that this was the year. This team was special. This time, things would be different.

 

And you what? Things were different.

[nfreeman]

Wow. Thanks SCFan. That was outstanding.

 

Holy cow I can't wait until October.

 

Let's go Buf-fa-lo!

[BrightLights]

So true, and well put. Every Buffalo fan can relate to this.

[Corp000085]

AWESOME

[SCSabresFan!]

After all this logo talk, I felt we fans needed a break.

[Quickdraw]

Heh, the entire season just came back to me as I read through this. What a year. My eyes are watering.

[BuffalOhio]

I too, loved this team as I have loved no other.

 

It was truly a magical season.

[hopeleslyobvious]

Just a couple of side notes...We did still have a really good defenseman in the lineup (Lydman), and no defenseman were playing in their first NHL game in game 7. Paetsch played earlier in the year against NJ.

[X. Benedict]

That pretty much taps right into the marrow of Buffalo sports.

 

I often wonder why I feel it as much as I do, but I know I'm not alone.

 

:)