By now, we’re used to the routine when it comes time to award the winner of the Eastern or Western Conference their trophy. Jonathan Toews of the Blackhawks opted to treat the Clarence Campbell trophy like it had a mix of the plague, ebola and something from the jungle that hasn’t been discovered yet and didn’t even bother touching it. Philadelphia’s Mike Richards, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care what was going on and embraced the Prince of Wales trophy.
“There was actually a little bit of a debate on the ice,” Richards said. “I thought about it a bit [Sunday] night. My first instinct was to grab it. Obviously, it took us a lot to get here and obviously [that’s] not the trophy that we want. But we haven’t done anything conventional all year, especially in these playoffs, so I might as well go against the grain one more time.”
Then again, hockey fans aren’t the sanest of fans around. We’re the type to grow out a playoff beard with our teams, or dye our hair to match the team (although I may be speaking a bit too personally there) and try to conform to all sorts of strange phenomenon in a way to appease the fantastically mythical “hockey gods” who smite all those who don’t believe.
Just keep this in mind, if hockey gods existed, would they have allowed the Chicago Blackhawks to go since 1961 without winning the Stanley Cup or kept the Toronto Maple Leafs Cup-free since 1967 while teams from Anaheim, California and Raleigh, North Carolina found ways to win? I think not.