The Atlanta Thrashers had one of those terrible travel days that you’d see in a movie, complete with a Hollywood ending.
We've all seen those movies before.
The owner wants to sell a team so badly that they bring in every underacheiving ballplayer she can, takes away all the club's amenities and forces them to ride a broken down bus. The team responds by defeating the evil New York Yankees for the AL East crown ("Major League").
A team full of replacement players with a washed up QB comes through in the big game ("The Replacements").
A gritty undersized, academically-challenged football player realizes his life-long dream to play for Nortre Dame through hard work ("Rudy").
Well, the hometown Thrashers, who were relegated to the position of also-rans after the franchise traded away their superstar player, Ilya Kovalchuk, two days ago, finally had one of those magical nights on Saturday.
Things started off badly enough as the team was stranded overnight in the U.S. Capital after their charter plane was unable to get into Washington, D.C. after the Thrashers’ 5-2 loss to the Washington Capitals on Friday night due to a blizzard that dumped over over two feet of snow around parts of the region.
With all three of the Washington metropolitan area’s airports closed the following morning, the team started its long journey home at 9:30 AM, embarking on a slow, four-and-one-half hour, 120-mile bus ride down I-95 to Richmond, Virginia.
“It was a pretty ardious bus ride,” Thrashers coach John Anderson admitted. “You're sitting on the edge of your seat. Unfortunately, (Thrashers GM) Don (Waddell) and I and (Assistant GM) Larry (Simmons) and (Director of Media Relations) Rob Koch had to sit up the front of the bus.
"We could see it all unfold in front of us. We were all over the road. Thank goodness the players were in the back, they couldn't see what was going on. It was a pretty scary ride.”
Scary, indeed.
Somewhere along a slippery route where the road signs were obscured with snow, the team’s charter bus clipped the mirror of a oil tanker along a snowy stretch of the highway.
The bus had to go 10 miles down the interstate before the two vehicles had even a chance to stop to assess the damage.
Precious moments were lost as Atlanta's scheduled departure time of 2:40 PM slipped. Three o’clock. Three-thirty. Four o’clock. The start time of the game was pushed back to 7:30 PM.
The Thrashers sat on the team’s charter, a Miami Air Boeing 737-800, for another few hours while the plane was deiced twice and the club's equipment was on-loaded onto the charter. According to what GM Don Waddell told a Thrashers town hall meeting of disgruntled season ticket holders, the plane raced against time facing the imminent closure of the Richmond airport.
With moments to spare, the jet finally roared down the runway, chewing up pavent before before soaring into a low Virgina sky where the visibility according to Anderson was a couple hundred yards, at best.
Wheels up at 4:24 PM.
Touchdown in cold, dreary Atlanta 84 minutes later.
And the mad dash to the cars began. The players made the quick journey up I-85 to the Downtown Connector, straggling into Philips Arena around 6:25.
The start of the game was pushed back until 7:53 PM to give the travel-weary team a chance to warm up.
“I knew we’d get there,” Thrashers blueliner Ron Hainsey said. “I didn’t know what time. We were just trying to get there one way or another.”
The Thrashers finally regained some sort of hockey normalcy, taking the ice for the first time that day for their usual pregame warm-ups at 7:14 PM.
When the puck finally dropped, the normally half-full, sedate arena was filled with its fourth-largest crowd of the season. The place was rocking.
Without the benefit of a morning skate or that traditional hockey player afternoon nap, the home team came out flat and found itself down, 2-0, on two early goals by the Florida Panthers. The crowd of 16,743 grew a bit restless.
Then came that Tinseltown ending.
Atlanta posted two second period goals goals to erase the deficit before the rookie kid, who was recently acquired in a trade for that franchise player snapped a 16-game goalless drought to notch the game winner in his first home game as a Thrasher.
Niclas Bergfors took a pass from Nik Antropov, dodged an oncoming Panthers player and blistered a wrister from between the circles over the stick of Florida netminder Tomas Vokoun with 4:26 left in the final period to lift the beleaguered bunch to victory in front of a suddenly racuous home crowd.
Another rookie, Evander Kane, iced it with an empty net tally in the game's final seconds. His shot missed the net, but a goal was awarded after Florida's Dmitry Kulikov threw his stick at the puck in frustration.
Yes, it wasn't a division title and the Thrashers beat the pedestrian Panthers, not the defending champion Pittsburgh Penguins.
Granted, while the team may have some holes, it is not nearly as down and out as some of those classic underdog clubs in those big-budget Hollywood flicks. But the Thrashers didn't exactly need to channel the spirit of Jobu to get this win, either.
And for one day, the downtrodden Thrashers organization -- that of the zero playoff wins in nine-plus seasons -- finally had one of those magical moments. The kind that you can build your season upon.
The players and their fans not only left Philips Arena that night with a memorable victory, but also with one heck of a story to tell.
“I was just telling the other players on the plane that this would be something to tell your grandkids about,” said bluleiner Johnny Oduya, who was also acquired from the New Jersey Devils in the Kovalchuk trade. “It was quite an experience. A lot of things went through your mind.”
Indeed. Sometimes real life is better than a movie script.
Call it “Planes, no Trains, but Automobiles,” and get the manuscript to California.
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