PITTSBURGH - JUNE 15: Pittsburgh Penguins fans lined the streets of downtown Pittsburgh to greet the team during the Stanley Cup Champion Victory Parade on June 15, 2009 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Jamie Sabau/Getty Images)

Pens' smiles shinier than Cup
Montreal Gazette
June 16, 2009

They held a Stanley Cup parade in Pittsburgh Monday: the celebration of excellence for the royalty of the National Hockey League. The lifelong dream of everyone who ever laced on a pair of skates.

Sidney Crosby was there, holding the Cup high in the air as he rode in the back of a truck alongside Marc-Andre Fleury. So was Maxime Talbot, whose two goals in the series finale were all the Penguins needed to skate off with the prize. Reports on the parade say Talbot jumped out of the car he was riding in to shake hands with the fans.

Evgeni Malkin. Jordan Staal. Sergei Gonchar, who played only 25 games during the regular season, suffered a partially torn MCL following a knee-on-knee collision with Alexander Ovechkin -- and was back on the ice for the final two rounds of the playoffs.

Head coach Dan Bylsma was there, wearing a smile that appeared as if it would never go away, and probably won't for most of the off-season after leading the team to seventh heaven.

Laughing faces. Smiling faces. Players loving a parade and getting all of that love back from the tens of thousands of young and old spectators lining the route of this celebration.

They were all there, but where, I wonder, was Michel Therrien on Monday? Only a year before, he had led the Penguins to the Stanley Cup final and in February was out of a job. Wherever he was, what was he thinking of? Was anybody thinking of him?

In the wild celebrations that erupted following Pittsburgh's 2-1 victory in Game 7, nobody was overlooked in the blizzard of Hockey Night in Canada interviews with the new champions. To a man, they were asked what winning the Cup meant to them. Was it the best moment of their lives? Who were they thinking of when the Cup was being presented?

When Therrien was replaced at a time when the Penguins were struggling to get into the playoffs, did the players really think they would?

Did they, in their wildest imagination, envision getting to this Game 7 night? When Crosby limped off the ice in the second period, how did the Penguins manage to play as well as they did without their captain?

The answers poured out of the players. It was all about "team," they said. Yes, they knew they could make it to the playoffs. Yes, they were confident they could go far in the playoffs. Yes, there was some concern when a player of Crosby's calibre left the ice, but no, not to the extent that any of them felt the game -- which they led 1-0 at the time -- would slip through their fingers.

The post-game interviews lasted the better part of an hour, between hugs and kisses with their families and children who had joined them on the ice. The Penguins richly deserved the attention paid to them, during which they said all of the right things -- but something that wasn't said was disappointing. Among all of the interviews, I counted only one Penguin -- Matt Cooke -- mention Therrien.

Yes, Cooke told his interviewer, this was a night he and his family would never forget, and for that he wanted to thank "Mike" Therrien and Dan Bylsma for letting him play. (Cooke, a tough grinder, was signed as a free agent during the off-season, dressed for 76 games and logged a solid average of 14:12 per game during the regular season.)

Nobody should be surprised a coach who was fired in February received only fleeting mention from his former players. Win, and your coach is a golden boy. Lose, and you're promptly forgotten. Cooke didn't forget, which is class of the highest order by a player.

Yes, the Penguins had problems under Therrien this season. A change was needed. So I can understand why no players, other than Cooke, mentioned their former coach during the post-Game 7 interviews, but it would have been nice if they had.

Pittsburgh Penguins co-owners Mario Lemieux, left, and Ron Burkle celebrate winning the Stanley Cup hockey championship with fans as they move along the victory parade route in Pittsburgh, Monday, June 15, 2009. The Penguins defeated the Detroit Red Wings, 2-1 in game 7, Saturday in Detroit.

Penguins fans incredible
By Joe Starkey
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
June 16, 2009

The best sign of the day, by far, was the one that read, "Hossa, Are You Watching?"

Somehow, I doubt Marian Hossa was tuned in to the Stanley Cup parade Monday, but even he would have been impressed with the performance of Penguins fans.

This was as much about them as it was about the team.

"Best fans in all of sports," Mario Lemieux said.

He might be right.

Standing there amid the masses — which included about 10 people atop a tiny parking-lot ticket booth near the stage — I couldn't help but think of the bad old days.

Like the time fans filled Mellon Arena and cheered madly for terrible teams as seasons ended in 2004 and '05. The first of those clubs finished 23-47-8-4, yet coach Eddie Olczyk was treated to a standing ovation after a victory over Carolina in the home finale.

Goal scorers that day were Matt Bradley, Milan Kraft and Lasse Pirjeta. There was no parade.

I also thought of last season, when Penguins fans gave their club a rousing ovation after the bitter Game 6 loss to Detroit, then cheered the Red Wings as they celebrated a championship (too bad Wings fans weren't nearly as classy when the skate was on the other foot Friday night).

Penguins fans might have had their finest moment at Game 6 of this year's Cup final. General manager Ray Shero made a point to mention that yesterday, as he stood on the stage at the intersection of Stanwix Street and Boulevard of the Allies, staring into a sea of black and gold and powder blue.

"When we needed you guys the most, in Game 6," he said, "it was absolutely the most fantastic crowd I've ever seen."

Coach Dan Bylsma also spoke of Game 6, and how meaningful it was to hear the crowd chant "Fleury! Fleury! Fleury!" before the opening faceoff (they chanted it again as Bylsma spoke).

Goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury had been pulled from the previous game after allowing five goals.

Bylsma said when he heard that chant before Game 6, he turned to assistant coach Mike Yeo on the bench and said, "We're gonna win this one."

"That's what you guys did for us," Bylsma said.

The Penguins kept the ceremony short and sweet on a gorgeous, 82-degree afternoon under a sky that was as beautifully blue as those throwback jerseys.

Fleury also expressed gratitude to the fans, saying, "I know sometimes I let some soft ones in, and you guys still cheered for me, so thanks a lot!"

One of the biggest roars was for veteran winger Bill Guerin, who found himself "almost speechless" for one of the few times in his life.

Guerin can be an unrestricted free agent July 1. Fans obviously do not want that to happen. They chanted, "One more year! One more year!" after Guerin followed team captain Sidney Crosby to the microphone.

"I'm going to let these guys talk for a little bit," Guerin said, laughing.

You half-expected Shero to hand Guerin a new contract right there on stage.

Guerin thanked Lemieux for having the players and their families over to his house Sunday night, where the Stanley Cup wound up in the Lemieux swimming pool, just as it had 18 years earlier.

Later, fans were treated to Evgeni Malkin giving his parents — "The Genos" — a sip of champagne out of the Cup. Crosby did the same for his parents, Troy and Trina.

The longest-tenured member of the team, defenseman Brooks Orpik, was there for the bad old days, so he knows all about the special love affair between the town and its team.

Yet, even he was surprised with the turnout yesterday.

"I tried to imagine how it would be," Orpik said. "It was 100 times better."

And sometimes so loud you wondered if Hossa could hear it

Penguins' Stanley Cup parade draws throngs of fans
By Joe Mandak and Ramit Plushnick-Masti
June 15, 2009

PITTSBURGH (AP)—Just call it the city of champions.

Four months after celebrating the Steelers’ sixth Super Bowl victory, Pittsburgh Police estimated 375,000 people converged downtown again for a parade, this time in honor of the Stanley Cup champion Penguins. People lined streets—in some places standing 20 deep or crowding onto multilevel parking garages—to get a glimpse of the team and the cup.

One woman, who initially said her name was “The Greatest Pittsburgh Penguins Fan Ever” but then noted most people call her Alison Coyle, drove eight hours from her home in Brick, N.J. to attend Monday’s parade. Arriving in Pittsburgh at 2 a.m., the 45-year-old thought she might get some sleep, but was so excited she was up by 6.

“I would give both my arms and both my legs to be here,” Coyle said, donning a Sidney Crosby jersey and holding her camera above her head to try to get a better shot of the players.

The Penguins won their third Stanley Cup Friday in a 2-1 victory over the Detroit Red Wings. The parade followed the same route that drew an estimated 300,000 fans in February for the Steelers Super Bowl XLIII victory.

“This is great and there’s gonna be many more,” said Andrew Mehlich, 30, of Pittsburgh, who attended the parade with several family members.

Chanting “Let’s go Pens,” fans honked plastic horns and cheered. Team captain Crosby held the cup in the air as he rode in the back of a truck alongside goalie Marc-Andre Fleury.

“Thank you guys,” Crosby told the crowd. “What can I say? I mean the support you guys have given us, the support you have showed … You deserve to be called the city of champions. You deserve the Stanley Cup.”

One fan carried a handwritten sign: “Nothing like a Fleury in June.” Others had homemade aluminum foil replicas of the prized cup and threw black-and-gold confetti—the team’s colors—along the parade route. Forward Maxime Talbot jumped out of a car to shake hands with fans.

“It’s a holiday for Pittsburgh,” said Michelle Solkovy, 31, of Pittsburgh, who took the day off work and brought her 4-year-old daughter, Kendall, to the parade.

Betti Labbe, 40, and her husband Joe Szekeres, 44, of Frederick, Md., drove to Pittsburgh Sunday night. Szekeres is a lifelong Penguins fan who attends about five games a year—but his wife needed a little more coaxing.

“It was them or divorce so I picked the Penguins,” Labbe said.

Melanie Milko, 46, who’s from the Pittsburgh suburb of West Mifflin and said she used to cut former Penguins star Jaromir Jagr’s mother’s hair, said Monday’s celebration was better than the fan rallies held after the 1991 and 1992 championships.

“There’s a lot more respect for hockey everywhere,” said Milko, who painted the numbers of her 10 favorite players on her fingernails for the parade. “Hockey’s it.”

Many fans wore new T-shirts saying “Steel City Champions.” Others opted for the old-style, light blue Penguins jerseys.

Some fans are season ticket holders who often see the Pens play live. Others are like twins Peter and Nick Ellefson, 14, of Beaver Falls, who have only seen it on TV. Still, Peter summed up the victory in one word: “Sweet!”

Kevin Greager, 35, drove about three hours from Greencastle with his son Kody, 8, and daughter Kelsey, 5. Graeger said when he heard Sunday the parade was happening he knew he had to come despite the long drive.

“We don’t know when they’re going to win the cup again so we’re going to Pittsburgh one way or another,” Greager, a firefighter in Frederick, Md., said.

Stanley Cup embarks on long journey
By Kevin Gorman
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
June 16, 2009

its first three days with the Penguins, Lord Stanley's Cup has been suspended outside a second-story window on the South Side, taken a dip in Mario Lemieux's swimming pool and served as the grand marshal of a Downtown parade before hundreds of thousands of cheering fans.

The adventures are just about to begin for that crazy Cup.

Before hockey's Holy Grail embarks on its 100 days of celebration, it will head Wednesday to Las Vegas for the NHL Awards Show, where Penguins center Evgeni Malkin is a finalist for the Hart Trophy and captain Sidney Crosby for the Mark Messier NHL Leadership Award.

"To see the Cup among that many people and the attention it draws, no matter if you're a hockey fan or not, there's just something about it that's so special," Crosby said of the reaction to bringing the Cup back. "That's the great thing about it that I don't think you see in any other sport, where guys get to spend so much time with the trophy they worked so hard to get."

Of North America's four major professional sports leagues, only the NHL awards a trophy that has the names of every member of a championship team engraved on it. Where the others re-create replicas of their trophy and award them annually to the champions, there is only one Stanley Cup. And that changes everything.

The NFL awards the football-shaped Lombardi Trophy to its champion. Major League Baseball gives its champion the World Series Trophy, featuring pennants of every team. In 1978, the NBA changed its hardware, with a basketball about to enter the net, from the Walter A. Brown Trophy to the Larry O'Brien Trophy after its former NBA commissioner and past U.S. Postmaster General. The league also started a Legends Tour to make it more accessible — and recognizable — to basketball fans.

None of them have the cache of the Cup.

The 35-pound, 34 1/2-inch cylinder is a magnet for everyone from movie stars — it stands taller than actor Verne Troyer, famous for his role as "Mini-Me" in the Austin Powers series — to sporting superstars. The Cup spent Sunday at PNC Park, took at trip to Detroit's Comerica Park last year and has appeared in ballparks and stadiums in nearly every city it has visited.

"I've had the Stanley Cup lined up with the World Series trophy with the Red Sox, and the Stanley Cup had a bigger crowd in Boston. The same thing with Steelers and Lombardi Trophy," said Mike Bolt, one of the four men who serve as Keeper of the Cup for the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto. "The players say, 'You get to have your name on it, take it home, eat out of it and drink out of it.' It's funny. I've heard ballplayers' say that, in other sports, they play for a ring. In hockey, they play for the Cup.

"That's why it's the most famous trophy in professional sports."

One with a reputation for skinny dipping.

The Cup has twice ended up at the bottom of the pool at the home of Lemieux, who the Penguins to back-to-back championships in 1991-92 as a Hall of Fame center and is now the club's majority co-owner. The first time came in '91, when Phil Bourque got the party started by tossing it into the water, causing it to get water-logged and tarnished (which is why the Hockey Hall of Fame created the position of Keeper of the Cup).

Not to be outdone...

"We did that already," said Penguins right wing Bill Guerin, noting that he was one of the players who rescued the Stanley Cup Sunday night. "A couple of us did ... a couple of times."

What makes the Cup even more famous is its tradition of allowing every player from its champions to spend a day of his choosing with it, one that has seen it straddle the Siberian border of Europe and Asia (by Detroit's Pavel Datsyuk) and be flown by helicopter to the top of Bull Mountain in Cranbrook, B.C. (by Anaheim's Scott and Rob Niedermayer) in years past.

When Penguins left wing Chris Kunitz won the Cup with the Anaheim Ducks in 2007, he split the first half of the day at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich., before boarding a private plane to his native Regina, Saskatchewan. When Penguins right wing Craig Adams won the Cup with the Carolina Hurricanes in '06, he visited a children's hospital in Calgary, Alberta. When Penguins left wing Ruslan Fedotenko won the Cup with the Tampa Bay Lightning in '04, he returned for the first time in six years to Kiev, Ukraine, where 8,000 people lined its main street and the party was broadcast live nationwide.

The Penguins players are still planning their day with the Cup, working with Hockey Hall of Fame vice president/collections curator Phil Pritchard to plan a geographically feasible schedule that will allow each player and member of the front-office management their 24 hours with the prized possession.

"I have no idea what my plans are for the summer, but I've got lots of ideas for the Cup," said Crosby, who plans to take the Cup to his hometown of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia. "This is something we've all dreamed about, had a long time to think about. I'll bring it home and, hopefully, share it with a lot of people back there and spend as much time as I can with it.

"You look back to all the people that helped you to get to this point, and they all had a hand in it, whether it's midget hockey coach or Junior. In a way, it's almost like a way to say thanks to have them see you with the Cup and achieve your goal. They can feel part of it, too."

Penguins forward Maxime Talbot will get to live out his dreams twice. Not only did he score both goals in the 2-1 Game 7 victory over Detroit last Friday, but he will get to return to his native Montreal with the Cup.

"That's the day that you dream of," Talbot said. "I'm going to go back home to Montreal and do something with charity to raise a little money for my foundation and share it with the city where I grew up with hockey and my family, friends and old coaches — everyone who helped me get here.

"I can't wait for that day."

Stanley Cup takes a trip to PNC Park
By Rob Biertempfel
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
June 15, 2009

The Stanley Cup continued its victory tour through Pittsburgh on Sunday with a stop at PNC Park.

Penguins captain Sidney Crosby, wearing flip-flops and a Pirates jersey, toted the Cup onto the field before the interleague game against the Detroit Tigers.

The Penguins beat the Detroit Red Wings, 2-1, Friday in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final.

Winger Bill Guerin threw out the first pitch, which wobbled a bit and kicked up some dirt as outfielder Nyjer Morgan made the catch.

"Don't you know a split-finger fastball is supposed to drop like that?" Guerin said, trying to contain a smile. "I was imagining a left-handed batter, brush him back a little bit, you know?"

The sun-splashed crowd of 27,565 — which included about 5,700 walk-ups who likely were lured to the ballpark by the Cup's visit — would have roared just as loudly if Guerin had chucked the ball out onto Mazeroski Way.

Pirates players and coaches gathered along the third-base line and cheered as Crosby lugged the Cup out of the home team's dugout. The Pirates had gotten a close-up look at the Cup a few minutes earlier, when the Penguins brought it into the clubhouse.

"Guys were all over it," Guerin said. "Everybody was getting pictures and stuff like that. It was really neat. They're all real good guys and appreciative we brought it in. Our kids were getting bats, balls, everything."

Morgan, who played junior hockey in Canada before turning full-time to baseball, was eager to touch the Cup.

"Absolutely," Morgan said. "I did my own victory lap."

Jordan Staal and Max Talbot emerged from the clubhouse, each wearing one of Matt Capps' batting practice jerseys. Was there a swap involved, perhaps a few autographed pucks and hockey sticks?

"Nah," Capps said. "I just gave 'em to them."

Staal also was waving one of the Pirates' bats as he strode off the field. Eric Godard wore Morgan's warm-up jersey.

Later, Guerin brought the Stanley Cup into the press box and broadcast booth. Pirates employees queued up to pose for pictures.

"It's been an amazing couple of days," Guerin said. "This city is just crazy about it right now. It's awesome. Pittsburgh's such a huge sports town. The fans ... incredible. It's been wild."

This afternooon, the Cup will wind its way through the streets of Downtown during the Penguins' victory parade.

"It's going to be pretty nuts, I think," Guerin said. "But it's a good thing, a good nuts."