Connor McDavid Was Supposed to Have a Hero’s Finish in Game 7. Instead, the Panthers Did.

Florida won its first Stanley Cup on Monday night, closing the loop on a decade of improvement for the franchise. McDavid and the Oilers, meanwhile, are still searching—and will now have to try to climb the mountain again.

There were just over seven minutes left in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final when things began unfolding exactly as everyone had imagined they would. The Florida Panthers, playing at home in the southeastern city of Sunrise, were hanging on to a slim 2-1 lead over the Edmonton Oilers, but it didn’t seem like that’d last too much longer—not when Oilers defenseman Evan Bouchard was holding the puck at his blue line, licking his chops, and not when Connor McDavid, the best player in hockey, looped sharply off a screen and toward the net like a star basketball player getting wide open in crunch time.

All day long, all week long, really—ever since McDavid turned in back-to-back four-point performances in Games 4 and 5 to bring the Oilers back from the brink of getting swept—this was the kind of bright-lights moment that the greater sports world wanted for the 27-year-old hotshot. Going into Game 7, Stephen A. Smith had talked about McDavid’s legacy on First Take. The Wall Street Journal had clued its readers in to the historic nature of what McDavid might accomplish. “His glide is faster than most guys’ stride,” ESPN announcers gushed on Monday night as a McDavid cam trailed him during pregame warm-ups. Again and again, McDavid was being compared to another Oiler, Wayne Gretzky, though this was nothing new; their names have been spoken in the same breath since McDavid was a teen. Now, here was a chance for this generational athlete to come up big, to tie a game, to steal the momentum, to lead by example. And as Bouchard fed McDavid the puck, it all seemed to be happening.

Turning to face the goal, McDavid deked one way as Panthers goalie Sergei Bobrovsky lurched the other. Time itself slowed down, I’m certain, because I suddenly had enough of it for the next few minutes, days, and decades to unfold in my mind’s eye. First McDavid would tie the game himself, I thought as I stared at him right there on the doorstep, or perhaps he would coolly pass the puck to a teammate who could do so, earning himself yet another postseason assist. (Already McDavid had amassed 34 in these playoffs, more than anyone else ever, including Gretzky.)

A tying goal would activate the many, many Oilers fans in the Florida building, it would rattle Bobrovsky, and it would heap renewed pressure onto a Panthers team that would suddenly be just one bounce away from losing in the Cup final for a second straight year and letting a 3-0 series lead slip right through its hands. Given all of that, I reasoned, a tying goal would almost certainly lead to a winning goal for the Oilers, which meant that before the night ended, McDavid would lift the Cup and become an immediate all-timer. By week’s end, he’d probably have his impact on the NHL compared to Caitlin Clark’s effect on the WNBA, managing to piss off both hockey and hoops fans in equal measure, and—

And, well, never mind. None of this happened because out there on the ice, right there by the crease, Panthers defenseman Gustav Forsling descended on McDavid and de-escalated the explosive play into a whole lot of nothing. McDavid’s teammate Leon Draisaitl tried hacking at the loose puck, but the moment was gone, and the clock started ticking down faster and faster on the increasingly desperate Oilers. (When ESPN commentator Ray Ferraro described the seconds as “melting away,” I pictured Dalí’s clocks draped over the benches.)

In the final minute of action, McDavid was so exhausted that he fell to his knees. The 2-1 score remained unchanged. And when the buzzer finally sounded, it was officially the Florida Panthers’ time. McDavid and his Oilers would have to wait.

Rather than playing the fool in the growing legend of McDavid, Florida wrote itself a Game 7 hero’s finish. After losing the title to the Vegas Golden Knights in a five-game dud of a series last season, this year’s Panthers doggedly and adroitly focused on advancing the plot. And instead of becoming the premise of some humiliating trivia question about the biggest sports chokes, the Panthers had all the answers in Game 7, earning the 1993 expansion franchise its first Stanley Cup.

It wasn’t easy: “We needed to lose three in the finals,” droll Panthers coach Paul Maurice observed afterward, “to learn how to win four.” It wasn’t always popular: Florida’s path to the Cup involved pissing off Boston fans, breaking the true-blue hearts of Rangers nation, and halting McDavid’s march toward hockey glory. But ultimately, the Panthers’ title was a deserved culmination of more than a decade of trying and failing and moving and shaking and adapting and trading, a just reward for an organization that just kept on keeping on and lived to tell the tale.

Not to get all middle-agey and “I’m reminiscing this right now,” but this year’s Stanley Cup playoffs had me feeling sentimental long before the puck dropped on Game 7. Regardless of which team ultimately went all the way, I already felt as though I’d been along, however distantly, for their lengthy rides.

Back in 2012, for example, when I was tasked with covering the daily goings-on and nitty-gritty of NHL hockey, I encountered Bobrovsky—then a quiet second-year backup to the Flyers’ wacky Ilya Bryzgalov—as he was thrust into the Winter Classic spotlight. A year later, I went to the 2013 entry draft, where the Avalanche took Nathan MacKinnon first overall and then the Panthers, in my retelling, “zigged instead of zagged” and nabbed Aleksander Barkov with the second pick. Asked what he knew about his new home that night, Barkov said: “Very much sun and good beaches and warm weather.”

Two years later, I basked in that warm weather and spent a couple of days profiling Aaron Ekblad, then a teenaged defenseman learning the NHL ropes in his rookie season for Florida. It was a transitional time for a long-beleaguered franchise that had undergone recent coaching, management, and ownership changes. Entire sections of unsold seats inside the stadium were obscured by glum black drapes bearing Party City ads. I had breakfast with an ambitious Panthers executive, Matt Caldwell, who had recently left his job at Goldman Sachs to join the team, and he told me he’d rather have empty seats than continue to condition fans to expect free tickets just to fill the place up. (In the past, there had been many such promotions.) In business school, Caldwell said, he’d read a case study called “The Chicago Blackhawks: Greatest Sports Business Turnaround Ever?,” and he thought the Panthers were positioned for a similar ascent.

It took a little time, by which I mean it took a decade, but these days, all those guys are Florida’s old hands—and steady ones at that. Bobrovsky stole Game 1 of the Cup final for the Panthers, was a difference maker in Game 7, and smiled wider upon winning the championship than I have ever, ever seen from him. After the game, he talked about how he’d taken a day off from practice before Game 7, played with his daughter, and emerged refreshed. When McDavid was awkwardly awarded, in defeat and in absentia, the Conn Smythe Trophy for playoff MVP, the Florida crowd chanted their preference: “Bob-by!”

Team captain Barkov—a two-time Selke Trophy winner for best defensive forward, 80-point scorer this season, and Panther points leader both in the playoffs and all time—was the guy accepting the truly valuable hardware from commissioner Gary Bettman. (Panthers fans were not happy that ESPN cameras missed the moment of Barkov’s first Cup hoist.) He became the first Finnish captain to lead his team to a title and the umpteenth dad to have a cranky toddler who didn’t want to smile for the camera.

Young Ekblad is now a densely bearded, shot-blocking veteran blue-line presence who stood crestfallen in the Panthers locker room last June and promised: “We’ll find a way to come back next year.” And Florida sure did—setting a new franchise record for attendance along the way, too.

As ever, there were too many happy players to name out there on Monday night, each with their own personal telling of a shared story. Carter Verhaeghe and Sam Reinhart, both of whom scored goals in Game 7, celebrated with their loved ones, while Kyle Okposo, who was drafted 18 years ago and who came to Florida at the trade deadline hoping to win his first Cup in his final season, talked about how wild it was to see his 8-year-old son at the game and think about how, when he was that age, the closest he got to a Cup was strapping on rollerblades in the driveway and using his imagination.

Evan Rodrigues, who contributed 15 points in the postseason, said in a TV interview: “For all the kids out there playing mini sticks or playing road hockey, keep dreaming about this moment. It’s even better than you can imagine.” And Matthew Tkachuk, who arrived in Sunrise two seasons ago following a splashy trade with the Calgary Flames, choked back emotion as he told ESPN’s Emily Kaplan that “it’s not a dream anymore; it’s reality.” (Tkachuk’s dad, Keith, took a friends-’n’-family turn raising the Cup, but his brother, Brady, who plays for the Ottawa Senators, did not touch it, keeping his dream alive.)

Team general manager Bill Zito wandered aimlessly around, weeping, and on TV, Ferraro remarked matter-of-factly: “Yeah, he’s been crying for the last half hour.” It was a beautiful thing.

Then there were the Oilers, another team I’d long been watching come of age, growing pains and all. As a kid poring through NHL record books, I knew Edmonton to be pleasantly inescapable: It was, after all, the place where no. 99 had his ’80s heyday. (And Mark Messier, and Jari Kurri, and Paul Coffey, and so on and so forth.) Those Oilers teams were nigh unstoppable, winning five Cups in seven seasons. Later Oilers teams—particularly the versions of the franchise that existed when I covered hockey full-time from 2011 to 2015—seemed inescapable, too, thanks in large part to a passionate, influential group of terminally online stathounds loosely referred to as the Oilogosphere; long may they complain.

But in all other aspects, the modern version of Edmonton was for years almost the exact opposite of its famous forebears: eminently stoppable and reliably chaotic. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who has been on the Oilers for 13 seasons, has played under nine coaches and four different general managers. The organization was a perennial loser, a dynasty only in draft lottery terms. Between 2010 and 2015, Edmonton was so shambolic that the franchise “earned” the first pick in the entry draft not one, not two, not three, but four times.

But that fourth time was the real charm. In April 2015, I was on a serene golden-hour cocktail cruise in Naples, Florida, during a friend’s bachelorette party when I glanced at a text message, yelped, and almost fumbled my phone right into the bay. “The Edmonton fuckin’ Oilers!” I cackled, unhelpfully, to a boatload of concerned, confused, sun-kissed bridesmaids who smiled politely as I tried to explain that one of the biggest laughingstocks in the National Hockey League had won the first pick in the draft yet again—and in doing so, had essentially lucked into snagging the player of the future.

Thousands of miles away, the Edmonton Journal agreed with my overwhelm. The draft wasn’t for another couple of months, yet the publication was already asking: “Is Connor McDavid the Second Coming of Wayne Gretzky?” Ridiculous, perhaps, yet even the Great One himself weighed in on the young prospect, calling him “the best to come along since [Mario] Lemieux and [Sidney] Crosby.” Gretzky’s hope for McDavid, he said, was that “he brings Edmonton a Stanley Cup and he breaks my records … he’s got the talent and the makeup to do it.” One scout called McDavid a “brilliant, graceful, and imaginative offensive machine.” Fans called him “McJesus.” Another scout observed: “All-in-all, a dominant center with all of the will, power, and intangibles to become a successful hockey luminary.” (My own addition to the genre, upon being in the same room as McDavid for the first time: “McDavid is such a low talker that it’s difficult to hear him; asked what he’d choose as his goal song if he had his choice, he came up empty. ‘I’m not really a music guy,’ he said.”)

McDavid’s legend had been looming in hockey spheres since he was a small child. When he was 4, his folks lied about his age so that he could play with the bigger kids. When he was a tween, he was already having to make tough decisions among multiple elite programs. At age 15, he was the third player to be granted “exceptional player status” by Hockey Canada, enabling him to play major junior hockey a year early. At age 16, he watched the Chicago Blackhawks win a(nother) title and tweeted, wistfully: “Always cool watching the Stanley cup presented but at the same makes me so jealous.” When he was 18, he was drafted first overall by the Oilers and was given not so much the opportunity but the mandate to win a Cup himself.

At age 20, McDavid was a phenom, flipping pucks to himself in games like someone at backyard batting practice and signing nine-figure contract extensions like someone commanding a boardroom. By age 22, though, he was describing his frustration level as “really high … really, really high,” as his team missed the playoffs. At 24, he was feeling more upbeat: “It might feel like we’re light years away,” he said, “but we’re a lot closer than I think it feels today.”

And this summer, at age 27, he came about as close but no cigar as it gets. He brought all sorts of attention to the game of hockey with singular did-you-just-see-that plays like a weaving, dishing sequence in a must-win Game 5 that led to an Oilers goal—but he couldn’t win the series by himself. He was honored with the Conn Smythe, an award he both deserves and doesn’t and a trophy that he almost certainly will want nothing to do with. He broke some of Gretzky’s records, fulfilling half of the Great One’s wishes for him, but unfortunately, it wasn’t the half that McDavid really wanted—for his team or for himself. “It sucks,” he repeated several times after the game, because after all these years and all those games and all those questions, what else is there to say?

“I’ve never hugged so many sweaty men in my entire life,” crowed Maurice, who first coached in the NHL as a 28-year-old with the Hartford Whalers and was now winning his first Cup at age 57. Another first-time champion was Roberto Luongo, a longtime All-Star NHL goalie who retired in 2019 and now works in the Panthers front office. “This is what you work for your whole life,” Luongo told Sportsnet’s Luke Fox. “I’m just as invested as when I was playing. Coming to every game. Trying to help make it better and finding guys to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.”

Seeing Luongo celebrate was one of many things that made me sentimental on Monday night: After all, he was semi-infamously in net for the Vancouver Canucks team that lost the championship to the Bruins in 2011. That was a rollicking, ridiculous seven-game series filled with press conference sniping, emo walks on the waterfront (by Luongo), a zesty Bruins comeback, and teeth. It was also the first postseason NHL I’d ever covered. It’s been nine years since I was last on the official hockey beat—my final piece of that particular era was optimistically titled “The Sun Is Rising in Buffalo”; can’t win ’em all!—yet I’ve noticed over the past few seasons that only recently have many of the people I covered way back when finally seen their career goals come to fruition.

Seven long years (and several truly brutal playoff ousters) passed between when I first profiled the young Tampa Bay head coach Jon Cooper and when his Lightning won back-to-back titles. The Colorado Avalanche drafted MacKinnon in 2013 but didn’t win it all with him until nine years later. It took Jack Eichel, the subject of that sunny Buffalo piece in 2015, until 2023 to raise a Cup—not with the Sabres, but with the Golden Knights, a team that didn’t even exist when he was drafted. Recently, when the Carolina Hurricanes named their new GM, Eric Tulsky, I felt a surge of unearned secondhand pride as I reflected on the days when he was but a lowly, genius puck blogger who dwelled among us. I’m old enough to remember when the news broke that Chris Kreider was going to leave Boston College and join the Rangers; I’ll never, ever forget that man’s hat trick this season, more than a decade later. (Hey, how come that last one doesn’t quite have the happy ending as all the rest?!)

The life cycle of pro hockey, it turns out, lasts a lot longer than one might expect. Like the sport itself, it rewards grinders, competitors willing to just keep hopping over the boards and giving ’er another go.

But what was so fun for a few days there was thinking that maybe someone could break the cycle, move the needle, grow the game, draw the sword from the stone. And for at least one infinite instant in the third period of Game 7, McDavid sparkled like he was that someone. Then the magic passed, and the sword stayed stuck. Instead it’s the Florida Panthers—having paid their dues and punched their tickets and caught/thrown all those rats for all those years—who get to spend their summer break in sweet celebration, gliding while all 31 other teams have to stride. They’ll gallivant around Disney World or Lake Mendota, they’ll thank their high school coaches, they’ll plunk their babies into the same Stanley Cup that they’ll later drink margaritas out of.

And McDavid, meanwhile, will stew and wonder and say all the right things and even mean most of them, and then he’ll sigh heavily and try again. For his whole career, he has shown the world a set of skills that most players only dream about. But after all these years, there’s still that one elusive thing we’ve not yet seen him do out there on the ice: smile the goofy smile of a first-time Cup champion, a look that is always better than you can imagine.