No, I'm not still drunk. Really.

When I woke up on Thursday morning, my knees hurt, my palm was throbbing, I had bruises on the tops of my feet and I reeked of beer.

Life was perfect.

 

A lot of attention over the past few days has been focused on what happened in Vancouver. The riots there were horrible, a disappointing reaction from a city that prides itself on its tranquil image. It's even worse that many of the participants came armed, bringing things such as Molotov cocktails in before the game even started in order to fuel the chaos. The Canucks could have walloped Boston and those people would still have behaved in the same way.

This post, however, is not about that. The riots have been rehashed, written about, and commented on by pretty much everyone, so all I'll say is that I know most Canucks fans are nothing like those people and are instead like those who respectfully stayed in Rogers Arena to watch Bettman present Chara with the Cup as "Dirty Water" played overhead. That was pure class.

What this post is about is standing in a huge mob of people, chanting "USA! USA!" as beer is sprayed everywhere and Roman candles go off overhead. It's about walking down Cambridge Street as cars honk and random people give you high-fives. It's about screaming till you're hoarse and smiling until your face hurts and desperately wishing you hadn't worn sandals.

Tomorrow I'm going to watch the championship parade, the second championship parade I've ever been to (the first was for the 2008 Phillies and was one of the best moments of my life). I'll be wearing Schadenfreude's "Hail Seguin" shirt along with sneakers, this time, because I've learned my lesson.

I recently got into an argument with a friend of mine over whether it would be better or worse if your team won the Cup every year. He said that would be great; I think it would suck. The reason Wednesday night was so special was because it's the sort of thing that doesn't happen every year, or even every decade. The sheen would wear off otherwise and we'd turn into New Yorkers, arrogantly demanding our due instead of ecstatically celebrating our luck.

Growing up in Philadelphia, you get used to being screwed over by the sports gods. This is the team that went for twenty-five years with no championship despite having teams in all four major sports. The only city I can think of offhand with worse luck is Cleveland. Boston has had seven championships in eleven years, which kind of makes me want to hurt someone. The Bruins, however, were the red-headed stepchild of Boston sports teams, not having won since the days of Bobby Orr. And then on Wednesday Patrice Bergeron put one past Luongo to make it 1-0, and I nearly fell off my chair from flailing. This was really happening.

I know the Flyers will win another Cup, someday, and I know that when they do my first move will be to buy tickets down to Philly so I can be at the parade. But until then I think I'll hang on to the memory of my adopted team pulling out a Game 7 against heavy odds, to bruised feet and sore palms and shit-eating grins, and to the knowledge that tomorrow I'll be standing on the street with thousands of other people glorying in the sheer thrill of victory, because the beautiful thing of it is that I don't know when my next ticker-tape parade will be.