TAMPA — Not every miracle happens.
Not all dreams come true. The Stanley Cup that was supposed to be stamped with a large flaming C now has a lightning bolt on it. It belongs to Tampa's team, not the team that had captivated all of Canada for two months.
What was so close for the Calgary Flames, so tantalizingly close they could feel it, was taken from them last night.
The Tampa Bay Lightning took it. They got two goals from Ruslan Fedotenko, an assist from Conn Smyth Trophy winner Brad Richards, an inspired effort from Vincent Lecavalier and enough defence to stop the Flames and snuff a country's hopes.
If you were a Lightning fan, it was all great fun to watch. If you were a Flames fan or you simply wanted the Stanley Cup to be held high by a Canadian team, it was painful -- as enjoyable as having a boil lanced or your heart broken.
Of course, the Flames gave until it hurt.
They skated. They tried. They scored on a late goal by Craig Conroy and almost tied the score 2-2 when Jordan Leopold fired a shot with Tampa goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin out of position. But Khabibulin managed to slide across and get a piece of the puck and that signalled the end of Calgary's quest.
"In the end, we ran out of gas," Calgary coach Darryl Sutter said. "Winning Game 5 actually hurt us more than it helped us because of the injuries we sustained. The longer the series went, the tougher it was going to be."
"Can you discuss the heart your team showed?" Sutter was asked.
"That's what they were playing on," he answered. "That's all the they had left."
The Flames never stopped believing, but it was all too much. Knocking off three division champions to get to the final was one thing. Winning all those games on the road was another. Knocking off a fourth division champ in the Stanley Cup, in a seventh game played in the other team's building, that was the mountain the Flames could not climb. And you could sense that would be the story, given how the game began.
Sutter insisted early yesterday that Robin Regehr "probably wouldn't play."
He pointed to a Game 5 injury to his left ankle, but Regehr did play and struggled. He was not the same defenceman he was earlier in the series. Then again, he wasn't alone.
In the first period, Fedotenko almost bulled his way through Calgary defencemen Andrew Ference and Rhett Warrener before being hauled down and clipped above his right eye for six stitches. Several minutes later, with the Flames' Oleg Saprykin off for tripping, Fedotenko got his revenge by grabbing the rebound off a shot from Richards and snapping in his 11th goal of the postseason.
Wobbled and hobbled, the Calgary defence gave up two more scoring chances before Fedotenko scored again in the second and the partying begin inside and outside the St. Pete Times Forum.
Many Calgary hockey fans are going to scream bloody murder over what happened late in this Stanley Cup final. They're going to point to referees Kerry Fraser and Brad Watson and their calls that gave Tampa a two-man power-play advantage for a full two minutes in the fourth game.
They're going to seize on Sutter's comments that nobody wanted Calgary to win the Cup and that certain forces were doing their best to snuff the Flames' chances.
They're going to harp on The Phantom Goal That Was Or Wasn't in the sixth game, the one Martin Gélinas thought he'd scored and the NHL is still reviewing, we think.
But realistically, the fourth game was the one the Flames will regret. On that night, even with two penalties going against them early, the Flames had plenty of time to come back and score. Their offence was motoring. Their players were in high gear. But something was off. They fired 29 shots at Khabibulin but the best chances were off target.
That game was Calgary's downfall because it would have given the Flames a 3-1 stranglehold in the series. Instead, the Lightning hung around and finally broke their win-one, lose-one trend with last night's thunderous victory.
Conventional wisdom had it that Tampa would wear down in the face of the Flames hitting and, at times, that looked like a distinct possibility. What kept it from coming true was the fact the Flames began to wear down under the strain of their own efforts. Shean Donovan got hurt. Regehr got hurt. Stéphane Yelle played hurt. Plus, there were all those missing bodies that could have added depth or salvation if only they'd been ready, but they weren't.
For two months, the Flames were a most amazing story. They were the working-class heroes with a no-nonsense approach and an unpretentious superstar in Jarome Iginla. To watch them was to think the impossible was possible.
But not every miracle happens. Not every dream comes true. The Lightning have the Stanley Cup. The Flames had heart, now they have the heartache and that shouldn't be, but it is.
