As a Minnesota Wild fan, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing (read: bitching) about how Minnesota sports are cursed. And it’s maybe not always obvious from the outside. Looking in, you see talented teams, young teams, teams with championship windows wide open. And I’m not going to say that’s not true. Not when I watch players like Kirill Kaprizov, Matt Boldy, Brock Faber, and Jesper Wallstedt play 82 games a season. No, the curse that befalls Minnesota sports is not the curse of a bad team.
It’s the curse of hope. The curse of almost. The curse of never enough. The curse of fighting tooth and nail and falling just short in the exact moment it matters most.
All of that to say: I’m familiar with the sting of the first round exit. It greets me in April like an old friend. The Wild made the playoffs eight times in a ten-year span and lost in the first round every single time, a feat so brutal that it made them the first team in the history of the four major North American sports to accomplish it. That’s not bad luck. That’s a curse. And it’s not the same sting that a Sabres fan or a modern Red Wings fan feels, the team that’s never good enough to get there. That’s a different kind of curse. I’m genuinely not sure which one is worse.
Men’s professional sports teams in the Twin Cities have gone more than 50 straight playoff appearances without a championship. The last time anyone in this city celebrated a men’s team was 1991. I was not alive in 1991. Neither were most of you reading this. We have inherited a tradition of heartbreak we didn’t even get to earn firsthand.
What Is a Curse, Actually
Hockey is a superstitious sport and I am no exception, so I will not be speculating on what it would take for the Wild to break theirs. I will not be hiring an Etsy witch. I will not be manifesting. I don’t fancy tempting fate like that.
But I did, in a move that says a lot about me as a person, look up the definition. Merriam-Webster defines a curse as “a prayer or invocation for harm or injury to come upon one.” Which implies something interesting: a curse is placed. It requires an agent. Someone, somewhere, has to have wanted this for us. Which raises the genuinely unsettling question of who, exactly, looked at the state of Minnesota and decided they needed this particular variety of suffering.
The Timberwolves haven’t won a championship . The Vikings have a championship drought that predates their current roster’s memories. The Twins once lost 18 straight playoff games, the once longest postseason losing streak in the history of men’s major professional sports in North America. The Wild turned first round exits into an art form. Someone invoked something and we are all living in it.
I don’t know who cursed us. But I think about it more than is probably healthy for a person.
The Presidents’ Trophy Curse: A Cousin of Ours
The Wild clinching a playoff spot tonight got me thinking about curses more broadly, and naturally my mind went to the Presidents’ Trophy, hockey’s other great curse, and one that is very relevant to this particular postseason.
The premise is simple: since the Blackhawks won the Presidents’ Trophy and the Stanley Cup in the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season, no Presidents’ Trophy winner has gone on to win the Cup, or even make the finals. That’s over a decade now. The Winnipeg Jets extended the streak this past season.
The failures have not been quiet, either. The 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning, a team that tied the 1995-96 Detroit Red Wings’ record for regular season wins, were swept in the first round by the Columbus Blue Jackets. And then of course there are the 2023 Boston Bruins, who are their own special chapter in this story. Boston set a NHL record with 65 wins that season, only to blow a 3-1 series lead against the Florida Panthers, one of the most spectacular collapses in NHL history.
The Rangers have been the closest thing to an exception. The Rangers have won the Presidents’ Trophy in 2024 and lost in the Conference Finals, which, relative to their peers, almost qualifies as an achievement.
This year, the Presidents’ Trophy should belong to the Colorado Avalanche, sitting pretty at the top of the West and looking every bit like the kings of the league. Which means, if you believe in this sort of thing, they are already cursed. The trophy is a beautiful, heavy, jinxed piece of hardware, and someone in Denver is going to have to live with that.
So What Does Any of This Mean
Here is what I keep coming back to: both of these curses, the Wild’s and the Presidents’ Trophy, share the same DNA. They are not curses of failure. They are curses of expectation. The Wild aren’t cursed because they’re bad. They’re cursed because they’re good enough to get there and not quite good enough to get through. The Presidents’ Trophy teams aren’t cursed because they’re weak, they’re cursed because they’re the best, and the best carries a weight that the playoffs are very good at exploiting.
There’s something almost philosophical in that. The higher you climb in the regular season, the larger the target on your back. The more people expect, the more brittle the whole thing becomes. Hockey, more than any other sport, is a place where the best team does not always win, where a hot goaltender and a bounce at the right moment can undo months of dominance in six games. The Wild know this. The 2023 Bruins certainly know this.
And yet, here we are. The Wild clinched tonight. I am, against my better judgment and all available historical evidence, feeling something that resembles hope.
I know better. I really do. I have the receipts. I’ve watched this team take a 2-1 series lead and then not win another game five separate times. I know exactly how this story usually ends.
But maybe that’s what makes fandom what it is. Not the championships, those are genuinely wonderful and I hope to experience one someday before I die, but the specific, irrational, annually renewable decision to believe anyway. To look at all the evidence and think: maybe this time.
The curse requires a believer. And I, unfortunately, remain one.
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