There could be no denying the emotion at the Lenovo Center on Friday night.
Claude Lemieux, who died last week at age 60, never played for the Carolina Hurricanes, but his son, Brendan had, just two short years ago.
And there was Hurricanes goaltender Frederik Anderson, whose agent was Claude Lemieux. The connections between this man and this team ran deep.
And yet, as the near-19,000 stood and honored Lemieux before Game 5, it was doubtful many, if any, truly understood the deepest connection of all between player and team.
Did the crowd know, or even appreciate, that without Claude Lemieux, nearly 40 years ago to the day he was remembered in Raleigh, the team representing the Research Triangle against the Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup Final starting on Tuesday might not even exist?
There are teams, players, moments, that live in a certain wing of sports history. They are those moments that are mocked and derided. Disco Demolition Night. The Butt Fumble.
And 100 miles to the southwest of Boston and about 110 miles northeast of New York, there is Hartford, Connecticut, and in the first week of May 1986, this town, the Insurance Capital of the World, threw a parade for its professional hockey team.
It’s fourth-place hockey team. It’s one playoff-series win hockey team.
Yes, they did that.
Forty years on, it’s hard to explain what the Whalers in 1986 meant to Hartford, to the entire state. The UConn men’s and women’s basketball teams might now have the bluest of bloods (national flag blue, thank you) and are considered sports royalty today, but in 1986 neither occupied anything meaningful in the Connecticut sports landscape – except maybe the pathetic 8-9 game in the Big East men’s tournament.
On April 29, 1986, Jim Calhoun was still the coach at Northeastern. Geno Auriemma had just completed a 12-15 season, his first in Storrs. Forget blue, the state’s sports color was decidedly green.
The Whalers entered the NHL in 1979, one of four former World Hockey Association teams to merge along with Winnipeg, Quebec and some guy named Gretzky with the Edmonton Oilers.
And for six seasons, the Whalers were delightfully terrible, reaching the playoffs only in the first season of 1979-80. Imagine, making the playoffs in your first year in the NHL.
The Whalers had Gordie Howe and his kids. They had “Miracle on Ice” legend and team captain Mark Johnson. They had the coolest “H-W” logo and an even cooler fight song called “Brass Bonanza” that every child of the 70s in Connecticut possessed on a .45 record album.
And in 1986, they had, dare it be said, a very, very, VERY real shot at winning the Stanley Cup.
You think John Tortorella has an edge? How about Whalers coach Jack “Tex” Evans nearly braining a Whalers writer in the locker room in Buffalo the first week of March 1986? The Whalers seemed destined to miss the playoffs again, even after trading Johnson to St. Louis for a goaltending stud named Mike Liut. Things were testy.
But the fight came at the start of a 12-3-2 run to end the regular season, allowing the Whalers to claim fourth place in the old Adams Division, and a playoff date with Quebec.
And then, something amazing happened in Hartford. They kept winning.
Led by the “FTD” line of Ron Francis, Sylvain Turgeon and Kevin Dineen, and the “LEG” line of Paul Lawless, Dean Evason and Stew Gavin, the Whalers steamrolled the Nordiques with a three-game sweep, winning the clinching Game 3 at home, 9-4.
Next up, the mighty Montreal Canadiens, with Bob Gainey, Guy Carbonneau, Larry Robinson and rookie goaltender Patrick Roy, and a late-season rookie callup named Claude Lemieux.
The series was a classic. The Whalers stole Game 1 at the Forum, fell behind 2-1, evened the series on Dineen’s brilliant overtime goal after leaving the great defenseman Robinson in his dust, then Dineen scoring the only goal of Game 6 to send the series back to Montreal for Game 7. And on the same night, April 29, 1986, that Roger Clemens was striking out 20 Seattle Mariners at Fenway Park, you could not hear that game on the radio in Connecticut, because all AM stations in the network were broadcasting Whalers-Canadiens.
And it was a classic. Whalers defenseman Dave Babych scored on a blue-line slapshot with just under three minutes left in regulation to force OT. And then …
Claude Lemieux, glove-side high on Liut, 5:55 of overtime. The first rookie in NHL history to score an OT goal in a Game 7.
It was over.
So, Hartford, after having finally, for the first time ever, being allowed to sit at the adult’s table of sports, celebrated a wild three weeks with a parade. Because, maybe, already, they knew what was coming.
It’s the great unanswerable. Could the Whalers have won that Stanley Cup, as Montreal did over the next month? Surely, Hartford was a better team than the New York Rangers, the conference final opponent.
And when Edmonton’s Steve Smith scored an own goal the night after Hartford’s Game 7 heartbreak and allowed the Calgary Flames to pull a seismic Game 7 upset, surely the Whalers could have beaten them, too. Montreal won it in 5.
We’ll never know. We’ll never know what sort of financial boon the franchise and city would have gotten, how many free agents might have come to Hartford, what kind of TV deal they could have gotten.
Would Howard Baldwin still have sold the team and built his dynasty instead in Pittsburgh? Would Richard Gordon, who bought from Baldwin, have sold to Peter Karmanos, who sold out Hartford and, with the blessing of Commissioner Gary Bettman, moved the team to Raleigh?
We’ll never know.
But we do know that in April 1997, the Whalers left Hartford — logo, fight song and all — never to return. They became the Carolina Hurricanes, won a Stanley Cup of their own in 2006, and are back again to tangle with the Knights.
The same Knights that eliminated in Round 2 this year Anaheim and their coach Joel Quenneville. He was a 1986 Whaler. And the ESPN lead game analyst for the next 4-to-7 games will be Ray Ferraro. He was a 1986 Whaler.
Gone. Never quite forgotten.
Jeff Goldberg was born and raised in West Hartford, Conn., and was a high school intern in the Hartford Courant’s sports department in 1986.
