Game Seven: Seven Ways to Scream and Shout.

"You make me laugh, you make me cry
I don't know which side to buy...
But the 7th thing, I like the most about you
You make me love you"
Miley Cyrus: "Seven Things"

Yes, I just used a Miley Cyrus song to open a post about game seven...but what the hell. It sums up my feelings about hockey as a sport to perfection. Be warned, this may switch into and out of lyricism, Falla-esque writing, and be fairly video-heavy....they will be referred to, so watching them would be an advantage...

Let's just get this out of the way early, because it feels so damn pleasing to see it in print.

Pittsburgh Penguins. Stanley Cup Champions, 2009.

Now, on to the game itself. I tried to do a running diary for post afterward, but it descended into complete anarchy after about ten minutes, when there was a very real possibility, at least in my mind, that I wouldn't survive the game.

Pens v Red Wings-the beginning...

Little did we know, watching this way back at the end of May (and this video may just about surpass the HNIC intro for Game 7 of Pens-Caps back in the Conference semis), that the series would go to seven, and little did I know that it'd age me ten years. Especially with the Pens down 2-0 after the opening two games in Detroit.

Then came Game 3, which meant that once again, there was a little hope...at this point I'm thinking "well, there's no sweep, and even if the Wings win now, we've gone down fighting".

Game 4 came and went, and suddenly it was two-two.

Game 5 was horrific. At that point, I thought the Cup was headed back to Detroit, and the best the Pens could hope for was to take it to seven. The jokes from the Red Wings of "history repeating" echoed long and loud, and the prospect of seeing the Pens lose the Cup on my birthday was not a great one, either.

But then fate took a hand.

Superstition is a weird thing. Certain rituals become imbued with their own magic power, and fans buy into this primitive form of sports voodoo in much the same way as the players do. As Game Six began, Pens fans were looking for some sign, any sign, that the race for the Cup wasn't already in its final stretch. And CBC, inadvertently, provided it by using a song that is almost like a modern-day spell of its own...

Step forward, "In the Air Tonight"

This song, I'm convinced, is either cursed or blessed with some sort of mystic power. Used before a sporting event, it makes extraordinary things happen.

And once again, it worked its magic.

And so we go to Game Seven.

The first period saw me regressing back to the primal consolations of superstition (I refused to sit in the same seat as that I'd sat in for game five), fear (when Valteri Filppula had a shot cleared off the Pens line, I uttered a sound containing fear, pain and hope never likely to be heard on this earth again), and jealousy (somehow, every bounce in the Joe seemed to go Osgood's way, or at least that's how my haunted eyes saw it).

Then came the Mad Max Redemption, otherwise known as the second period. First Maxime Talbot banged home his own rebound after hard work behind the net for one-nothing. The Wings came back furiously...but this night, Marc-Andre Fleury's pads had been stitched together by the angels themselves...they were truly blessed in stopping shots that, at the other end, could (and should) have gone in. Ten minutes gone, and 30 minutes at least from the Stanley Cup, Talbot went away again down the left side and aimed. His stick rose, lined up and fired, and puck left blade on a trajectory so perfect that Chris Osgood will never be able to tell you anything about where the shot came from, or indeed where it went past him, becuase he simply didn't see it rocket into the top corner.

And so, period three. Twenty minutes to realise a dream for the players, twenty nerve-wracking minutes for those watching. The period itself seemed fairly run-of-the-mill, though...right up until Jonathan Ericsson wound up and pulled the trigger on a howitzer from the point that "Flower" in his turn never even saw...and it was two one with eight minutes to play.

Two minutes later, with the Wings pressing, we saw the hand of the hockey gods reach down and pass the Cup to Pittsburgh. Nicklas Kronwall wound up from the point for another blast, and put every single last ounce of his 189lbs of muscle into swinging his stick, which sent the puck away on a path that scientists will tell you was ordained by physics and gravity, but Pens fans will say was influenced by the breath of angels. It rises slightly more steeply-than planned on a stray air-current somewhere in the course of its otherwise-dead-straight 70-feet-long journey, which takes it an inch or so higher than it perhaps would have gone on any other night, This inch means that it thumps into Fleury's crossbar, rather than the twine...and Flower himself rubs the bar better when its work is done...

There was still time for one more moment of magic...the Wings pile forward with the clock ticking down from ten to zero, and the puck finds Nick Lidstrom's stick tenths of a second before the buzzer-he fires, and Fleury stops it.

Game over.

And four months of celebrations in Pittsburgh have begun...

Gordie Howe, Chris Chelios, Steve Yzerman, Henry Ford, Alice Cooper, Tom Selleck, Kid Rock, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Madonna, Mitch Albom...

Your boys took a hell of a beating...

Now, hockey is officially over until August...so we'll come back to the UK and by Wednesday, I'll finally have a summary of events in the EIHL while we've been focused across the pond...