Making Boyhood Dreams A Reality

June 19, 2006 — -- RALEIGH, N.C. -- When he was a boy, Chris Pronger and his buddies played this game on St. Charles Street in Dryden, Ontario. He always won. "It's funny the way that happens," Pronger said Sunday, about 26 hours before the puck would drop on the seventh and deciding contest in this compelling Stanley Cup finals.

Dave Sandford/Getty Images Edmonton's Fernando Pisani has five game-winning goals in the playoffs. Will he get another in his first Game 7? Two years ago, Carolina defenseman Mike Commodore did not dress for Game 7, but he recalls the scene inside the Flames' dressing room after Calgary lost the final game of the Stanley Cup finals to Tampa Bay in Tampa.

"After the game, going into the dressing room, talk about no fun. That was painful. It's no fun seeing your friends and grown men cry, it's not a pleasurable experience," Commodore recalled.

From boyhood dreams that become reality to reality that becomes disappointment, this is the grand telescope of the game narrowed to its finest point. A single pinprick of light on a dark canvas -- Game 7.

Sixty minutes (or more, of course, pending overtime) to make enough plays collectively to earn a place in history. All of the hundreds of names inscribed on the side of the silver chalice are reminders for all time of players who did just that.

There are hundreds of names not on the Cup that could not. Hundreds of players who were somehow paralyzed by the enormity of the moment and became part of the great unremembered.

Monday night, the surging Edmonton Oilers and the reeling hometown Carolina Hurricanes will engage in one more battle of wills to determine on which side of that grand emotional ledger they will stand.

"I hope all of our paralyzation is out of us after last night. We were pretty paralyzed," Carolina coach Peter Laviolette said.

The NHL simply could not have asked for a better Stanley Cup finals or two better teams to battle for the first championship in the post-lockout NHL.