Taking Flight

The Philadelphia Flyers soar their way to the Stanley Cup.
By Dom Cosentino

By the time you read this, the Flyers may or may not have won the Stanley Cup. But, in some ways, it may not matter whether they did or didn’t.

It’s true that, for a majority of sports fans in the Delaware Valley, nothing less than winning a championship is good enough. And anyone who doubts that is free to examine the psychological scars resulting from that long, lamentable 25-year title drought that was watered so refreshingly two years ago, when the Phillies phinally won the World Series.

But the Flyers this spring have managed the impossible. They have managed to make winning everything something less than the only thing. Even in Philadelphia.

In their best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinal series, the Flyers spotted the Boston Bruins a lead of three games to zero. Their chances at survival were terminal—something like one percent—given that in the entire history of the NHL, MLB and NBA playoffs, a comeback from a 3-0 deficit had only happened three times before. But then the Flyers lost their goaltender, Brian Boucher, to an injury in Game 5. And then they fell behind by a score of 3-0 in the first period of the seventh and deciding game.

And then they came back and won anyway—a stunning comeback within a stunning comeback.

They became Team Lazarus.

“I’m satisfied,” said Pete Dippolito, a 22-year-old Abington resident. “Just the fact they came back against Boston. I never thought I’d see that.”

In this town, the widespread popularity of the Eagles and the Phillies is more or less inversely proportional to the yawning indifference so often shown toward the 76ers. But the Flyers possess what is arguably the region’s most dedicated, loyal core of die-hard fans—fans like Dippolito, who said he had failed to watch maybe two or three of the Orange and Black’s 82 regular-season games this season.

That’s a lot of Tuesday nights in January in front of the television watching the Flyers slug it out against some outpost like Calgary or Edmonton. Pilgrims who willingly put themselves through that, night after night, want nothing more than to someday set foot on Plymouth Rock. Yet even though the Flyers and their fans haven’t sipped from the Stanley Cup since 1975—13 years before Dippolitio was even born after the Boston series, the thought of a championship suddenly felt more like a bonus.

By coming back from the dead, the Flyers also crawled their way into the region’s collective consciousness. And not just because everyone likes a winner and wants to enjoy a ride that has the potential to end with a joyous parade down Broad Street. The Flyers’ run—wherever it happened to conclude—offered something more to die-hards, casual fans and those who might not have been paying any attention at all.

It offered a lesson about hope, about perseverance, about the value of continuing to plug away against all odds. These are characteristics that transcend sports that actually have meaning in our everyday lives. Sure, it might seem trite to suggest that a bunch of overgrown children wearing sweaters and skates while fooling around on an indoor frozen pond in late May are capable of reminding us of that. But that still doesn’t make it any less true.

Dippolito said “it wouldn’t be devastating” if in fact the Flyers had failed to win the Stanley Cup. One can only imagine the kind of party this region threw if they did indeed get it done. But, no matter what, the Flyers found a way to show us that even the impossible is always possible.

Dom Cosentino is a local sports columnist.