It takes a silversmith, working with a hammer and stamp, less than 30 minutes to engrave a player’s name on the Stanley Cup. Somehow, that feels perfectly equal to a lifetime spent struggling and sacrificing just to get there.The Stanley Cup is a symbol, yes, but it is also a permanent record. Every winning team remains on the Cup for roughly 50-60 years before their ringed section is removed and retired to the Hall of Fame to make room for new champions.Any Lightning players still alive by then will be old men, their legacies having long since been secured during a pandemic-interrupted season unlike any other in the NHL’s long history.And what reward is there for Lightning fans beyond boat parades and parties?Just memories.Memories that cannot be purchased, sold, rewritten or bartered. Memories that may eventually fade and distort around the edges, but will always retain a little of that guileless joy you felt at 10:49 p.m. on Sept. 28 watching players scramble to embrace on the ice.Years from now, you won’t tell a stranger that Brayden Point led all scorers with 14 postseason goals. But you may tell them that you never saw a skater move through defenses with such speed and grace as Point did in the final games of 2020.You probably won’t remember that six of the Lightning’s 16 playoff victories were in overtime, but you may tell your grandchildren that you never saw another team so disciplined, clutch and cool in the face of pressure as the Tampa Bay Lightning of 2020.You may even forget that his lone appearance in the playoffs came during the Lightning’s easiest victory in the Stanley Cup final against Dallas, but until your dying day you will swear Steven Stamkos' Game 3 goal was the most inspirational moment you ever saw on ice.This is why we care. This is why we devote an ungodly amount of dollars, days and devotion to follow a group of athletes from fall to summer.It’s an emotional attachment that is hard to replicate elsewhere. It’s a bond with strangers and neighbors. A sense of pride and accomplishment, even if it is vicarious. An appreciation of watching someone with enough ambition to reach out and grab hold of a star.And, I’m quite sure, it’s seeing little bits of how we’d like to think of ourselves in certain players. It’s Yanni Gourde’s fighting spirit. It’s Victor Hedman’s quiet dignity. It’s Pat Maroon’s smart-aleck persona on ice. It’s been a strange year for a lot of us in Tampa Bay. We’ve had fewer jobs to go to and no events to attend. Schools were empty and, at times, hospitals were packed. For months at a time, daily COVID-19 updates were the only daily standings we had.That’s what this hockey team did for us. They couldn’t change individual horrors or societal problems or economic concerns, but for a few months, they gave us a respite every other night. We may not have had water coolers to gather around, but we had the Lightning.Which leads to an apocryphal question that might have seemed absurd a year ago:If a Stanley Cup is won in an empty arena, does it still make a sound?It did in Tampa Bay. John Romano can be reached at jromano@tampabay.com . Follow @romano_tbtimes. Thunderstruck: Celebrate the Tampa Bay Lightning’s one-of-a-kind championship season with this hardcover collector’s book 2020 Stanley Cup victory print: Lightning championship poster coming to Sunday’s Tampa Bay Times newspaper
![John Romano - Sports Columnist](data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 50 50"/%3E "John Romano - Sports Columnist")