Puck It We Ball

Dear Puck It We Ball readers,

I come to you covered in sweat from a tailgate with a heat index of 102. I come to you rain-soaked from the burst of summer showers that rolled through just before puck drop. I come to you dusted in celebratory beer from the crowd around me.

And I come to you covered in tears. Some of them mine. Most of them this city’s.

I come to you from a city of good people and kind neighbors. I come to you from a city that waited twenty years for this. I come to you from a hockey city.

I come to you from a city of champions.

–

There is a version of this story where Carolina Hurricanes hockey was never supposed to work.

You know the version. A southern city, a market with no hockey tradition, a franchise relocated from Hartford into the Triangle. The old argument goes: these people don’t understand the game, they don’t really care, they’ll stop showing up the moment the team stops winning. It’s a transplant city. It doesn’t have roots. It can’t build the kind of sustained, generational love that the Original Six markets have, the kind that survives losing and bad trades and decades of nothing because your grandfather took your father who took you and now it’s in your blood whether you want it or not.

That argument is wrong. It has always been wrong. Now it is permanently, irreversibly, banner-in-the-rafters wrong.

What Carolina built is not a transplant fanbase. It is something more interesting than that, something that could only have happened in a city like this one. These fans chose this. They found it, or it found them, and then they decided it was theirs, and that decision stuck in the way that chosen things stick, deeper than inherited ones, sometimes, because you know exactly what it cost you.

I met some of them at the tailgate.

A group of guys, fellow NC State grads, with their tent up in the Lenovo Center parking lot hours before puck drop, grill already going, drinks already cold. They let us under their tent when the rain came without really being asked. The classic southern hospitality, served with an offer of hotdogs and smiles. 

One moved to Raleigh in 2006 not knowing a thing about the Hurricanes. One has been following them since he was nine. One grew up in Charlotte as a Checkers fan, got to NC State, and found out the Canes and the university were basically synonymous, after that, die-hard. One grew up in the  area going to games as a kid because his buddies played travel hockey, got tickets in first grade for selling Scouts popcorn, and has been coming to this building ever since.

And now here they all are, twenty-some years later, in a hundred-degree parking lot watching it finally happen.

I asked them what a tailgate at a heat index so high means in the context of North Carolina hockey culture.

“It’s North Carolina,” one of them said. “You get up at 8 AM on a weekend and within two hours you expect to have burgers on the grill and a drink in your hand and it’s gonna be hot all day. You’re just gonna power through and support your team. That’s just the way you live around here.”

I think this quote is important to fully describe the experience. Because he wasn’t describing a tailgate. He was describing a disposition. A way of going  through the world that this region produces in people – this combination of stubbornness and loyalty, the willingness to ignore the discomfort and keep going anyway. You don’t complain about the heat. You don’t wait for better conditions. You put the burgers on. You crack the drink. You show up for your team at a hundred and seven degrees because showing up is not a weather-dependent activity.

That is also, not coincidentally, exactly how this franchise has been built. Not by chasing stars who want the spotlight. Not by buying the glamorous version of the game. By powering through. By doing the work in conditions that aren’t comfortable, year after year, trusting that the conditions would eventually break their way.

When I asked them who they were pulling for for the Conn Smythe, it was unanimously Jordan Staal. They lit up saying his name. The love of their captain. Someone  brought up Jalen Brunson since the Knicks had just ended their own drought the night before. A fellow number 11 bringing a championship home to their city. The parallel of watching someone who has waited long enough finally closes it out, like the universe briefly deciding to pay everyone back for their patience all at once. 

I was also there with my friend, a lifelong Canes fan who has been living inside this franchise’s heartbreaks since he was old enough to understand them. The kind of fan who can tell you exactly which conference final hurt the most and why, who has watched this team close the gap year after year and carry the loss home when it didn’t convert.

I asked him what it meant to be here, one game away.

“2006 might as well not have happened for me,” he said. “I was five. My parents were Bruins fans, they didn’t care. So for me -I started playing hockey in 2011 – this is my entire lifetime of knowing what hockey is and knowing what it means. This is the first time.”

He paused, then: “It’s the peak that you can get to in a lifetime of caring about something.”

He wasn’t reaching for grandeur or trying to make the moment sound bigger than it was. He was just describing the years of a life spent caring about a team, the years of investment, the compound interest of heartbreak, the way each close call adds weight to the next one until you arrive somewhere like this and understand that everything you gave it was always going to lead here. The peak you can get to. 

When I asked what made this run different. 

“We came through with no injuries. The last four years we made it, we were always banged up in the first round – Turbo’s hand, Slavin’s face, those types of things. Never had a full squad going into the Finals.” A beat. “I think that’s been the big difference.”

Perhaps a bit of it is luck but a full squad going into the Finals is the result of a roster built with enough depth that losing one piece doesn’t break the machine, a training staff that keeps bodies together through a brutal schedule, a coaching staff that manages minutes carefully enough to get these men to June intact. What looked like good fortune was actually the culture finally getting to run without interference. The culture at full capacity. Carolina didn’t get lucky.

–

I think the national narrative of the Canes keeps getting it wrong.

Vegas assembled their roster the way you’d build a fantasy team with an unlimited card and no memory of last season. They picked up Mitch Marner in the offseason – Marner, who had turned down a trade to Carolina – and they still got handled in six games. By a team that doesn’t buy stars. By a team that drafts and develops and coaches and trusts the process even when the process is grinding and unglamorous and gets you bounced in the second or third round year after year and you have to come back to the ice in October and do it all over again.

Carolina is the actual misfits. Not the glittering golden Vegas kind, not the franchise built for a city of spectacle, not the roster assembled by a checkbook. The kind of misfits who work. Who stay. Who have the same coach for a decade not because they can’t afford better but because Rod Brind’Amour is not a system, he is a standard. 

Brind’Amour won this Cup as a captain in 2006. He came back and won it as a coach in 2026. Twenty years in the same city, the same understanding of what this organization is supposed to be.

And then there’s Eric Tulsky, the data analyst turned general manager, the man who got roasted for being too cerebral for this job until he stopped being roastable. When Mikko Rantanen made clear he had no interest in staying in Raleigh, thirteen games, then back on the market,  Tulsky didn’t panic. He moved him to Dallas and walked away with Logan Stankoven, twenty-two years old, the untouchable prospect Dallas had refused to include in trade conversations for years, the piece of their future they handed over because a superstar was too glittering to pass up. Stankoven came to Raleigh and looked like he’d always been here. 

There is no asterisk. The nerdy GM outmaneuvered every room he sat in, and now there is a banner going to the rafters to prove it.

–

The game itself was classic Carolina Hurricanes hockey. 

Taylor Hall scored three minutes and forty-seven seconds in and the parking lot made a sound I will not forget. Not loud the way a barn is loud. Loud the way a city exhales something it has been holding for a very long time.

Jackson Blake scored in the second and suddenly there was this feeling of hope floating through the crowd. By the third period Vegas couldn’t generate offense. Carolina’s defense was doing what Carolina’s defense does, which is make the other team feel like they are playing on slightly different ice than everyone else. Nineteen minutes without a shot on goal.

The crowd in the parking lot was buzzing. Every few minutes someone nearby would say it – oh my god they’re actually gonna do it – half to themselves, half to whoever was standing closest, like saying it out loud might make it more real or might jinx it and they weren’t sure which. There were chants breaking out and dying down and breaking out again somewhere else in the lot. There were cheers for saves, for clears, for nothing, just the energy needing somewhere to go. It felt like the whole parking lot was a held breath that kept escaping in pieces, that kept building toward something. 

And then Nikolaj Ehlers put it in the empty net.

–

I want to tell you about the moment the horn sounded and the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup. I want to tell you what it felt like to be standing in that parking lot when it happened, and I want to do it justice, and I already know I won’t quite get there, but I’m going to try anyway because some things deserve the attempt even when the attempt falls short.

The first thing is the sound. The crowd pop that goes up when it ends is not like other crowd pops. It doesn’t build. It just happens, all at once, from everywhere simultaneously. I have been in loud buildings and loud crowds and I have never heard anything that felt like that, not louder, exactly, but fuller, like the sound had mass. My body knew before I did.

The second thing is that I didn’t know what to do with my hands. There was so much feeling moving through me that my body couldn’t organize itself around it, couldn’t figure out what the appropriate physical response was to something this size. I think I was screaming. I think my arms went up. I honestly cannot tell you with certainty what my body did in those first few seconds because I was not fully aware of it.

And then my friends grabbed me and I grabbed them back and we were just holding on, none of us saying anything, because there was nothing language could convey in that moment. We had been standing in that parking lot together all night, through the heat and the rain and the tension of the third period, and now it was over, and we just held on.

Around us it was total chaos in the most beautiful possible way. The crowd was completely alive. People were jumping. Beer was spraying in the air, arcing up into the June heat and coming down on everyone and nobody cared, not even a little. Strangers were grabbing strangers with both hands, grabbing whoever was within reach, because the feeling was too large to hold alone. I turned around and there was a man behind me with his son on his shoulders, the kid maybe seven or eight years old, arms raised, screaming with everything he had. The dad was crying, standing there in the middle of all that chaos with tears running down his face and his kid up on his shoulders seeing the whole thing from above.

And I thought about 2006. About whether that dad had been at a watch party just like this one when he was a kid, maybe up on his own father’s shoulders, watching the Canes win it the first time. About whether he had spent twenty years waiting for a night he could give his son the same thing. About the kind of love that makes a person stand in a hundred degree parking lot with a child on their shoulders so that the child can say, when they are grown, that they were there. That they saw it. That their dad made sure they were there to see it.

And then confetti started coming down.

I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know if the watch party organizers released it or a fan had a confetti popper or if Raleigh just spontaneously generates confetti when things go right. But it was there, falling through the thick June air, catching the light from the big screen, drifting down into a crowd of people who were already catatonic with joy, who cheered while confetti landed in their hair and on their shoulders and it was almost too much, it was almost absurdly cinematic, except it was real and we were in it and it was happening to us.

I stood there with beer on my shirt and tears in my eyes in the Carolina heat and I thought: this is it. This is the thing. This is what all of it is for.

Not the hockey, exactly, though the hockey is everything. The thing underneath the hockey. The reason humans invented games and teams and seasons and playoffs in the first place, to have something to care about that is bigger than yourself, to hand your hope to something and then wait to see what it does with it, to be in a parking lot with thousands of strangers who made the same bet you did and watch it pay off together. The feeling of finally. The feeling of we did it, all of us, together, this city that nobody took seriously, these people who chose this before it was easy to choose it.

I have been a sports fan my whole life and I have never felt exactly that feeling before. The way it exists in your chest and your throat and your eyes all at once. I don’t think you can feel it without the waiting. I don’t think it’s available to you unless you’ve paid the price of it in seasons, in close calls, in years of almost. The joy at the end is made entirely of everything that came before it. You just don’t know that until it finally ends.

And then they gave Jordan Staal the Conn Smythe Trophy.

Jordan Staal is thirty-seven years old. He has been a Hurricane since 2012. He has watched this franchise get close and fall short so many times that it became the dominant story told about him, loyal, excellent, maybe one of the best defensive centers of his generation, and it might never be enough. Some players give everything to a city and it just doesn’t work out. That was the story. That was the version people had settled on.

He scored in five consecutive games and tied an NHL record. Won sixty-nine percent of his faceoffs. Was the heartbeat of a team that needed a heartbeat every single night for nineteen playoff games.

When they put that trophy in his hands the parking lot screamed until it had nothing left.

He said: I’m happy I stuck around. I believed in the culture.

It was a good weekend for number 11. But more than that. Staal’s words resonated with the fans the way they did because of the culture he believed in. It was the people in the parking lot. It was the tent in the rain and the confetti in the hair of a thousand crying strangers. He stayed for them, whether he knew their names or not. And when he said he believed in the culture, what he meant, I think, was that he believed in the kind of city that shows up at a hundred and seven degrees and stays.

The oldest Conn Smythe winner in NHL history. A thirty-seven year old man who decided this city was worth nearly his whole career, holding a trophy in Vegas while Raleigh chanted his name into the summer night.

–

The Stanley Cup travels. Every player on the roster gets a day with it, one day to take the oldest trophy in professional sports wherever they need it to go. It has been to children’s hospitals and dive bars and kitchen tables at two in the morning where whole families crowded around it just to make sure it was real.

This summer it is coming to Raleigh.

To the kid who sold Scouts popcorn in first grade and has been coming to this building ever since. To everyone who drove hours to stand in that parking lot. To every bar that filled up in October, every season, for twenty years, with people who chose this and kept choosing it. The cup is coming home to Raleigh.

Loyalty gets rewarded. Not always on schedule. Not according to any logic that makes the waiting easier. But sometimes the nerdy GM outsmarts the room. Sometimes the hockey guy coach lifts the same trophy twice. Sometimes the thirty-seven year old who stayed when he didn’t have to scores in five straight games, gets his name on the Conn Smythe, and stands on the ice with tears on his face while a city screams for him.

It was worth every second of the wait. I know that now. I think everyone in that parking lot knew it too.

Some cities are born into this. They inherit it. They get the story handed to them and they carry it forward and that is beautiful in its own way. But Raleigh chose it. This city looked at a hockey team in the American South and decided that this was worth loving. Worth the heat and the heartbreak and the twenty years of not yet. And that might the whole parking lot was still there, jerseys soaked through with beer and sweat, voices completely gone, faces turned up toward a screen that had just shown them everything they had been waiting for, standing in the thick Carolina night together like they had no intention of leaving, like none of them were ready for the feeling to end.

I understand that. I wasn’t ready either.

I love you, Raleigh. You beautiful hockey city.