Whenever an NHL team wins the Stanley Cup, as the Colorado Avalanche did Sunday night with a 2-1 victory over the Lightning in the Final’s sixth game, the scene and its aftermath are awash in tradition, nostalgia, and cliché.
There is the handshake line, a moment of honor and graciousness unmatched in North American team sports. There is the handoff of the Cup not to the winning team’s owner (as happens in the NFL) but to its captain, to the leader of the athletes who competed and triumphed. And there is, as in every sport, the post-series analysis — the conjectures and conclusions that one tries to draw from the outcome.
That last exercise is a familiar one around here. Having last won the Cup in 1975, the Flyers are going on nearly a half-century of annual soul-searching and solution-seeking. The process, for them and most other franchises around the league, is always fraught.
