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player ready...Denis Savard took off his gloves to shake hands, fulfilling a ritual unique to hockey. Defeat always sears the soul, yet this Saturday night had an eerie finality to it.
The Blackhawks, or at least some of them, will be back come September, but one of the greatest Blackhawks of them all, ever, might have put in his last shift.
“I thought when I came to the rink this afternoon how this could be it,” Savard said. “I thought of my mother and father, how much they did for me when they were alive, all the wonderful teammates, all the good times here. If it’s time to turn the page, it’s time.”
Savard took the opening faceoff for this Game 6 of the playoffs before a packed United Center. Soon after, he drilled a shot on his former Montreal neighbor, Patrick Roy, who was equal to it.
But little Denis, who could have danced all night, just kept on motoring. He fished the puck from behind the net and darted out to his right. Roy cheated that way, and Savard deftly fed Gary Suter, and it was 2-0 Hawks. And then it was 3-0, and this 36-year-old genius felt like a kid again.
“I thought maybe we had them,” Savard said. “But that’s a hell of a team, Colorado. We have to do some things here. I think I can still play, but I don’t know if I fit in their plans. I’ll have to sit down and talk with them. This is a business. If it’s over, it’s over.”
If it’s over, what a run it has been. Denis Savard began his Hawks career at the Montreal airport in late summer of 1980. His father Arthur, his mother Jackie and his three brothers were there, bawling their eyes out, because little Denis was leaving home for a big, strange city.
“I told them I would make the team,” Savard recalled, “just for them.”
He made more than the team. Hockey in Chicago was down then. The hangover from Bobby Hull’s 1972 departure lingered, and the Bobby Orr experiment was over. So when the little French-Canadian rookie made his Hawks debut–Oct. 9, 1980–the Stadium attendance was 10,875, dreadful for an opening night.
But before long, Savard would light up that building, filling nets and pockets and seats. The records are there, and so is the off-ice legacy. This guy is special, to his game and to his community, and if he didn’t win a ring in Chicago, he earned one with Les Canadiens in 1993 before he returned to the place he now calls home, Chicago.
It’s over now, though. Colorado came from nowhere to smoke the Hawks 6-3 Saturday night. The Avalanche scored more power-play goals in the series, 12, than the Hawks did at even strength. If the Hawks waste the summer dwelling on their paranoia about officiating, that’s their privilege. While they’re at it, they might as well delude themselves into thinking they’re oh, so close to Colorado in ability.
What was the song all winter? We’re only one player away? What is it now? We’re only one doctor away?
The cold truth is, Chicago’s talent pool is shallow, and so are the think tanks on some of the squad’s eternal prospects. You can’t teach brains, though, and the Hawks can only hope that Enrico Ciccone and Sergei Krivokrasov–whose mindless penalties helped make it all possible for Colorado Saturday night–will learn how to play before their arteries harden.
But if the Hawks imagine they’re so loaded that there’s no place for Savard, then he’ll consider a job in the organization. He can still light up a building, without skates, because he did better than go to Chicago and make the team for his family, as he promised.
Denis Savard went to Chicago and made the Hall of Fame.