If you don’t care about anything, the choice is easy, right? You line up to cheer on the Oilers on Monday night. They have the chance to join one of the most select clubs in sports, a club that allows its team and fans to dream even in the most dire of circumstances, a club that reminds us that the wisest words in sports were those of Yogi Berra.
“It’s not over until it’s over”
The Oilers had lost three straight games. They were dead. They looked worn and underpowered. The Florida Panthers were trying hard to avoid incurring the wrath of the Jinx Gods, but they probably already had their name on the Stanley Cup.
It’s 3-3 now.
Edmonton is now looking to become just the sixth team in North American sports history to beat another team in the first three games of a best-of-seven series and then pull off one of the most well-timed and illogical four-game winning streak of the year.
The first seven-game series in modern team sports was the New York Giants versus the Philadelphia Athletics in 1905. The NHL’s first best-of-seven series was the Montreal Canadiens versus the original Ottawa Senators in 1919. The NBA soon implemented the best-of-seven format, with the Philadelphia Warriors facing off against the Chicago Stags in 1947.
In all three sports, overwhelmingly these series end in a sweep or, as in the three examples above, a 4-1 “gentlemen’s sweep.” The Giants, Canadiens and Warriors all won their first best-of-seven series 4-1.
Sometimes, teams can get as close as six runs. Amazingly, that didn’t happen in baseball until 1999, when the Mets led the Braves 3-0 and won Games 4 and 5 before Kenny Rogers missed the strike zone in Game 6.
Even more rarely, a Game 7 may be played.
As you may recall, that exact thing happened once in baseball. It was 2004. The Yankees were leading 3-0, winning Game 3 19-8, and with three outs to go in an ungentlemanly sweep, with Mariano Rivera on the mound… well, this drive-by of Yankees fans who didn’t throw their newspapers or iPhones across the room doesn’t end here.
This has only happened four times in the NBA, most recently last year when the Celtics fought back against the Heat in the Eastern Finals only to somehow lose Game 7 at home. The Trail Blazers terrorized the Dirk Nowitzki-led Mavericks in a first-round series in 2003, and the Nuggets did the same to the Jazz in 1994 in a second-round series after Denver became the first eighth seed to beat a No. 1 seed.
The closest an NBA team has ever come to a comeback was in 1951 when the Knicks were trailing 3-0 against the Rochester Royals (largely due to the Knicks having to move their home games from the old Madison Square Garden to the 69th Regimental Armory), but the Knicks rallied back and trailed 74-73 with under two minutes left in Game 7 at Rochester’s Edgerton Park Arena before losing 79-75.
Sure, this marks the 10th time an NHL team has gone from 0-3 to 3-3, but that’s hardly surprising, considering hockey is blessed with more unique quirks (in-form goaltending, extreme momentum changes, weird bounces into weird spaces) than any other sport.
Four teams have done this: the 1942 Maple Leafs were the first to do this in the 1942 Cup Final (before the Red Wings nearly did the same to them three years later), the 2011 Bruins not only lost a 3-0 lead in the game, they also lost a 3-0 lead in Game 7 against the Flyers, and the 2014 Kings bounced back against San Jose (and carried that good form all the way to the Cup).
And, of course, there was the 1975 Islanders, who not only rallied from a 3-0 deficit to beat the Penguins in the Cup quarterfinals, but also forced a Game 7 against the defending champion Flyers in the semifinals, losing 4-1 in Game 7.
“We weren’t just trying to win one game at a time, one period at a time,” Islanders stalwart Chico Resch told me a few years ago. “It was one shift at a time, one minute at a time. You can’t do the big things unless you do the little things.”
The Oilers already know that part. But the hardest step lies ahead. Five of the nine NHL teams that have come close to winning, including the 1939 Rangers, have fallen short, but it usually hurts more than a sweep. The Blueshirts lost 3-0 to the Bruins in the Cup semifinals but rallied to win 2-1, 2-1 and 3-1 before playing in Game 7 at Boston Garden.
The game was tied after overtime. It was tied after the first overtime. It was tied after the second overtime. Then Mel Hill scored eight minutes into the third overtime to give the Bruins a 2-1 victory. “I don’t know how long this is going to make me feel bad,” an emotional Rangers manager Lester Patrick said.
If the Oilers lose, they’ll understand a lot of things.
