In 94 years of NHL history, what the hockey world witnessed Sunday in Winnipeg was a first.
Sure, teams have moved before. Sure, Canadian cities have rejoiced over getting a big-league team.
But there has never been a repatriation like this one.
The NHL went back to Minnesota, but it was a clean break away from the bad blood associated with the North Stars' departure.
The NHL went back to Atlanta, but how many people noticed?
On Sunday, the league returned to Winnipeg, perhaps with a different franchise, but one carrying the name and tradition and emotion and blue-collar hopes of the Manitoba capital and their beloved Jets.
The timing was perfect. The 15-year wait was long enough to make fans appreciate how different life was without big-league hockey. But it wasn't so long that generations passed and all the old fans moved on.
It was just long enough for the diehards of the Dale Hawerchuk and Teemu Selanne days to have their own children and pass on to them the magic of the Jets.
And sure, there was no big portrait of the Queen hanging at the end of the rink, but there were more than enough copies in the stands.
And there were enough original Jets stars on hand, some of them still living in the city, to remind us that the concerns about players not wanting to play in Winterpeg were a wee bit overblown.
Now, the game didn't exactly go according to the script. Mike Cammalleri wasn't supposed to score the first goal. The Habs weren't supposed to win 5-1.
The first goal in the history of the 2.0 Jets was supposed to be scored by a good old Canadian boy like Andrew Ladd or Evander Kane, not a soft Kazakh like Nik Antropov.
But for one day, the pomp and ceremony was enough.
Within two or three years though, playoff hockey will arrive at the MTS Centre and the decibel levels will rise again.
Josh Lewis can be reached by phone at 634-2654, by e-mail at [email protected], on Twitter at twitter.com/joshlewis306 or on his Bruins blog at bruinbanter.blogspot.com. Notice how he didn't brag about the Leafs' 2-0 start at all in this space? Uh, until now. Oops.
