andrew grimm
How often do you see the home team’s fans cheering when the home team loses?
It happened Tuesday night at PPG Paints Arena. And as a Penguins fan myself, it not only made sense, it seemed right.
Those cheers were for Marc-Andre Fleury, an older NHL goaltender who performed like a vintage MAF in his prime while wearing the jersey of the team he just defeated.
Years after wearing a black and gold uniform and a Minnesota Wild jersey with the team that just defeated the Penguins, he is loved by Pens fans as much, if not more, than his own team. Or at least it seemed that way.
Pens fans have seen Fleury grow from a young prospect, overcome his struggles, and give him one of the most iconic moments in team history, a diving save at the end of Game 7 in Detroit in 2009, leading to the Stanley Cup. I watched him win.
No matter how much sense it made during the expansion draft for him to ultimately be released and sent to Vegas with a younger option waiting on the wing and ready to take over, fans still hated it. To this day, I still have doubts about this move.
Now he is finally back in the city where it all began.
Last chance to say goodbye. I think it would have been hard to find anyone in that building who didn’t, at least subconsciously, want him to win in that scenario.
In between writing football previews, I would probably sit in my office and watch as many games on TV as I could.
For me, MAF represented a large part of the fandom.
I remember getting into an argument with my brother about hockey trading cards. We both wanted to keep our brother’s cards in our binders.
I’ll never forget the yellow track pants I had, but they were so big that when I was a kid I could put a pillow in them and wear them while playing goalie while playing mini-stick hockey in my living room. Ta. This is my own version of the now iconic Fleury. He wore yellow pads during his first few years with the Penguins.
When we polled the fans who were rooting for their team when they lost on Tuesday night, many of them had similar personal stories about growing up watching and rooting for No. 29. It should be.
In an age where there are an overabundance of memorial videos and players are leaving their teams like never before in all sports, that was absolutely justified on Tuesday. And look at not only what he meant to the fans, but the reception he received from his teammates who are still with the Penguins: Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang. They loved their old teammates just like the fans.
Throughout, it became clear that Fleury was always going to be special to Pittsburgh.
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