The Avalanche got the Stanley Cup foil they deserved in the Tampa Bay Lightning

The Avalanche finally have their opponent for the Stanley Cup Final. The two-time defending champion Tampa Bay Lightning won their 11th consecutive playoff series in dispatching the overmatched New York Rangers in six games.

This gives the NHL a highly-anticipated matchup between the Avalanche and Lightning, two teams with striking parallels in their journey to this moment.

You have the Lightning, winners of the last two Stanley Cups. There are no asterisks but their championships came in the bubble back in the fall of 2020 and then last year’s salary cap shenanigans aided defense of their championship. Both years they beat surprise teams from the other side of the bracket in what might have been their easiest matchup of each postseason.

We view them as the champions they are now, of course, but getting there required them to take a historic punch to the chin to put it all together. Their 128-point team in 2018-19 won 62 of 82 games…and promptly lost all four postseason games to the Columbus Blue Jackets in one of the most memorable first-round upsets in NHL history.

Calls for the Lightning to blow it all up and move on were loud. The Steven Stamkos/Victor Hedman/Nikita Kucherov Lightning not only fell apart in the playoffs in an embarrassing fashion, but they also seemed to be going in the wrong direction.

Their 2015 Stanley Cup Final loss to the Chicago Blackhawks felt like an eternity ago. They resisted the urge to overreact, doubled down on their group, and added pieces to the heart of the roster, not just nibble around the edges.

To begin their run the next year, the Lightning found themselves entangled with those same Blue Jackets. Game 1 saw the Lightning outplay the Blue Jackets but fail to solve Joonas Korpisalo and the game went an excruciating five overtimes. It was a do-or-die moment for the organization. A loss there might have broken Tampa Bay and history could have been changed forever.

We’ll never know because the Lightning finally broke through behind a Brayden Point game-winning goal and they never looked back. Greatness on the ice was buoyed by Jon Cooper, a former lawyer who had coached his way through the ranks, becoming the first person to ever win championships at all three junior levels in the United States and then coaching the Syracuse Crunch to the Calder Cup in just his second year in the AHL.

Cooper had won everywhere and him getting it done in the NHL validated Tampa Bay’s patience with him at the helm. Cooper oversaw this generation’s rise, fall, and phoenix-like rise from the ashes of that Blue Jackets series.

Just when it looked this year like the Lightning had finally run out of gas, they reminded everyone just who they were, who the reigning champs were. Staggered but still standing, Tampa Bay erased a 3-2 series deficit in Round 1 against the Toronto Maple Leafs and shattered the hearts of Leafs Nation in Toronto with a clinical Game 7 victory.

Idiots such as me saw that as a sign the Lightning were on the roped and waiting to be knocked out. Their second round series against the Florida Panthers, the NHL’s new hotness and this year’s President’s Trophy winner, was a tidy 4-0 sweep that saw Andrei Vasilevskiy make it his personal mission to quiet any talk about that explosive Panthers offense.

Down 2-0 in the conference finals to the plucky upstart New York Rangers, the Lightning were once again on the ropes as they faced a 2-0 deficit on the scoreboard in Game 3. They rallied, won the game, and won four straight against the Rangers as they found their legs and looked increasingly dominant.

Back in the Stanley Cup Final for the third straight year, the Lightning in many ways are facing a mirror. As they were cementing themselves as the NHL’s final boss, Colorado was trying to work its way through the same obstacles the Lightning faced.

Both Colorado and Tampa Bay’s cores are driven by homegrown talent. Success at the top of the draft for each team put them in position to climb from the basement into contention.

It’s not hard to look at Stamkos, Kucherov, and Hedman and see their parallel in the form of Nathan MacKinnon, Mikko Rantanen, and Cale Makar.

It’s not hard to look at Cooper and see a parallel in Jared Bednar, a coach who rose through the ranks on the back of championships in the ECHL and AHL and who teams are looking for the “next” version of in their own franchise reboots.

It’s not hard to look at Artturi Lehkonen and see the kind of acquisition Tampa Bay made in the past when they traded for Blake Coleman and then again this year in trading for Brandon Hagel.

It’s not hard to look at Brayden Point and his injury uncertainty and see a parallel in Nazem Kadri.

It’s not hard to look at Tampa Bay exorcising the demon against Columbus and see a parallel in Colorado stumbling in Game 5 against St. Louis this year before finishing off the Blues in St. Louis and see a team that exorcised its own demons.

Hell, you can even point to the parallel that each team stole a great defenseman from a New York team, Tampa Bay with Ryan McDonagh and Colorado with Devon Toews.

The Lightning won their way to the history books and are one series away from immortality. We see a two-time champ every so often, but nobody has won three in a row since the New York Islanders of the early 80s, who won four in a row before having the title taken from them by the Wayne Gretzky-led Edmonton Oilers.

If Colorado is trying to find another parallel to lean into, that’s the one to be after. They want to be the Gretzky Oilers, ending one team’s dynastic run and starting their very own.

The next time the Avalanche take the ice, it will be heavyweight v. heavyweight. The Lightning will face their greatest Stanley Cup Final threat in this three-year span. The Avalanche look to stare down the champs and take what they rightfully believe is theirs.

It’s a date with destiny.

It’s time to make history or be history.