Frenetic, that’s what it was, frenetic and fabulous. Frenetic in the 2-1 zippy Pittsburgh Penguin win at Detroit to win the Stanley Cup Championship from the Red Wings. Fabulous with Pittsburgh winning the fourth straight series in these playoffs on enemy ice in front of the enemy screamers, and scream they did.

If you watched the National Hockey League decider, and whether you give a hoot about hockey, sports or Tampa, do yourself a favor and get on this — let the new ownership get the Lightning back into the thick of it, into the playoffs, then into the Stanley Cup finals. Surely the drama of the game at Detroit returned those to the experience of the 2003-04 title game here when the Bolts struck Calgary—yes, Calgary, the pride of Canadian hockey then—2-1 in the Tampa arena and all heck broke loose.

Can’t remember a night like it in sports in Tampa, not really. Oh, sure, there were great Buccaneer football wins and Raymond James and old Tampa Stadium and there will be more under new coach Raheem Morris, and surely the Super Bowls have been memorable, but, hey noting quite like five years ago on June 7 when the great team John Tortorella coached beat Calgary at our place for the Stanley Cup. Have heard nothing as loud since. We were sitting beside team architect, David LeFevre, a Harvard man who even hugged me. 

Remember, this win was in Tampa. The Penguin finals win was in Detroit.

I was in the stands, in the front row, in LeFevre’s seats, instead of the pressbox, for the entire game. But, I worked the dressing rooms as a reporter and did the interviews with the heroes, including Coach Tortorella, now in New York, with wondrous Most Wondrous player Martin St. Louis, with star Brad Richards, with Vincent Lecavalier,  with Dave Andreychuk, with net tender Nikolai Khabibulin, with Fredrik Modin, with Dan Boyle, Chris Gratton, Tim Taylor, Brad Lukowich,  and the others rostered on that dandy NHL team that won it all for Tampa.

I asked LeFevre about the impossibility of all this—hockey in Tampa, the NHL in Tampa, the Stanley Cup victory in Tampa, and he said, “well, it is the reason we all got in this crazy business, isn’t it? Heaven knows if the Tampa Bay Bucs could win a Super Bowl a year ago and bring the Lombardi Trophy to the sunshine, why not us and the Stanley Cup?’’

His farsight in part may have come from his New York lawyering and big time association with his granduncle, Cyrus Eaton, a onetime hopeful minister who was congratulated on a sermon by a visiting church-goer who told him he would make a good salesman and if he chose to change professions, to get in touch. The visitor was John D. Rockefeller.

Later, Eaton, got in touch and never looked back. International trade and railroads, Western Pacific, (CSX now) were a couple of the results.

  I am certain David Lefevre has had finer moments—he is from the City, is a Yankee season ticket holder and Ivy Leaguer—but maybe not. The Lightning were surely an underdog and trailed in the Cup Series, but, what the heck, bet a nickel LeFevre never figured he’d be the nephew of Cyrus Eaton, one of the world’s most successful investor-entrepeneurs, of which I know but, hey, he was even an early buyer of a condo in the Monte Carlo on Bayshore Boulevard which I am sure he has sold for a ton prior to this bummer of a economic dip.

  And, oh, yes, those now involved say the Lightning will be back.

  Need what we saw on TV at our arena again.