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Let it be noted that at around 10:30 P.M. EDT on June 26, 2022 they finally stopped dropping hockey pucks for face-offs for the 2021-2022 season as the Colorado Avalanche defeated the Tampa Bay Lightning in Tampa 2-1 to win the Stanley Cup in a final series that went 4 games to 2. 

Earlier, at a family gathering, it was noted by some of those present that the last time a team from Canada won the Cup was in 1993, when the Montreal Canadians defeated the Los Angeles Kings 4 games to 1. More accurately, it should be stated that the last time a team full of Canadian hockey players hasn't won the Cup long before that.

Have you tried to pronounce the names on the back of all those jerseys of the guys carrying sticks? The N.H.L. is full of Swedes, Finns, Serbians, Poles and Russians. This is not a bad thing, but rather part of a persistent wave that has introduced more players from outside Canada than from Canada into the league.

Bobby Clarke, that tireless center of the Philadelphia Flyers and centerpiece of the Broad Street Bullies, once commented that giving a job to someone not from Canada was just taking a job away from someone who was from North America. Welcome to global hockey.

And this was not Colorado's first rodeo. It is the third time in the 21st-century that they've won the Cup. With 32 teams in the N.H.L. and four rounds of playoffs, it is increasingly hard to advance all they way to Cup heaven.

The word dynasty doesn't get used these days. Tampa had won the last two Cups, and was now the rare team to make the Cup finals three years in a row. The blurb was that if they were to "three-peat" then they would be the first team since the early '80s to win three in a row, when the Islanders won what is now an improbable four in a row.

When I first became a hockey fan in the late 1950s there were only six teams in the league, employing  basically 120 individuals, all from Canada, with the occasional player making it to the N.H.L. from say Massachusetts for a brief period.

Of the two Canadian cities in the league, Montreal and Toronto, Montreal had the advantage of always being allowed to draft the No.1 French-Canadian top-tier Junior hockey player. The Montreal dynasty was baked in by a draft process that was unfair to the other teams. The league headquarters were located in Montreal, ruled by the imperious Clarence Campbell. The coaches were the general managers, and there was no such thing as iPads behind the bench.

The last time Toronto, an original Six team, won a Stanley Cup was 1967. Recently they've gotten a little closer, but no appearance in the finals. The waiting is not over.

Here are some of the names of the players from the completed series between Tampa Bay and Colorado: Nikita Kucherov, Gabriel Landeskog, Nathan McKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, Cale Makar, Steven Stamkos Andrei Vasilevskiy, Artturi Lehkonen, Darcy Kuemper, Josh Manson, Andrew Cogliano, Ondrej Palat...

This is not your grandfather's N.H.L.

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