FOLLOWING THE FIVE

In June of 1997, the Detroit Red Wings deposed of the Philadelphia Flyers in a Stanley Cup Final sweep. Fans lined the streets with brooms in-hand for the parade; they had waited over four decades for this moment. 

As a young girl growing up in the outskirts of Philadelphia, the 1997 Stanley Cup Final was the most significant heartbreak I had thus endured. I remember crying so hard that I gave myself a nosebleed—an experience I was both alarmed and comforted to learn I shared with Bill Simmons (albeit he was bleeding for the Bruins in 1979).

Who were these Red Wings exactly, and where did they develop the audacity to cripple Broad Street from right under my nose? Sadness churned to unquenchable anger. And for better or worse, that anger melted into obsession.

Lifelong obsession.

Their last names had an enigmatic lilt—a delicate rhythm of stressed syllables and soft endings. “The Wizards of Ov,” they called them. Фетисов. Ларионов. The Slavic alphabet felt cryptic; I remember trying to construct my own method of decoding the backward R. The five perpetrators in question were flashy and smooth and irresistible to watch—weaving improbable passes between legs, sticks, and two-hundred pounds of rocketing muscle. They hammered rebounds and redirected ricochets until achieving what seemed to be inevitable when anything neared them: utter domination. My anger turned toward myself. The Detroit Red Wings are my enemy, but why can't I hate them? Why do I lie awake at night thinking about this goal or that pass?

Here's where things get complicated: the five perpetrators were from the Soviet Union—a political entity that imploded right after I was born. The very word evoked images of a mysterious hockey hinterland. I was convinced for much of my childhood that they still had a tsar, and I wondered if he played too. [Sidenote: they do have a President who is a point-sniping center—obviously].

I remember asking my parents about it one day; the looks on their faces were enough. Russia was one of those places that they talked about on the news with the affectation of the grim reaper. Much like falling in love with the wrong person, the more I was deterred, the hotter the flames burned—the whole thing had ensnared me. The spectacular surnames. The hockey. The winters.

I stole my Mom's credit card and bought a rare English copy of Anatoly Tarasov's memoir on Ebay. Tarasov, the father of Soviet hockey, had theories and tactics as unconventional and romantic as I dreamed they would be. The Summit Series, the Olympics, 1992 and Lake Placid....the aesthetic, the political soap opera, the concrete brutalist backdrop. The Soviet hockey program was the subject of more than one poorly-graded school essay; I was gifted two hermit crabs one summer and named them Misha and Vladimir. Mortifying.

The first college course in which I enrolled was “Russia Since 1917.” The professor—a close friend of Gorbachev—refused to use email, only a fax machine. The more rich and complex Russia's history became, the more complicated its participants, the further I fell. I remember holing up in my dorm room to watch Little Vera and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. I began to imagine Sergei Fedorov in the bleakness of an Arctic Circle winter; it was hard to picture given how seamlessly he seemed to fit into the fast car, hyper-commercial fabric of U.S. sports. When I later learned the whole story from Keith Gave’s The Russian Five—the daring defections, clandestine meetings and duffel bags full of cash—I felt relieved I had not known it sooner. I don't think teenage me could have handled it.

I asked my parents for a plane ticket to Moscow when I graduated from Columbia University. I would go back again as a tourist in the dead of winter, and two years later, I would move there as a journalist. Standing on the ice as CSKA Moscow lifted the Gagarin Cup—a team managed by Sergei Fedorov, no less —I felt like destiny had dragged me there. My whole life was a road that began on a tearful June Saturday and led to a sheet of ice in Russia; I belonged there because of how fiercely I had loved them, even in spite of everyone else’s best efforts.

Here is the not-so-silver lining: Russia is a sphinx. The closer you venture, the more questions you unravel.

Fedorov told me once that he believes geopolitical tensions are worse now than they were when he defected in the early nineties. I feel a veiled sort of sadness each time I cross the pond; it is a mix of gratitude for a reunion that feels fated, and yet an acknowledgement that we may be growing further apart. I will never fully grasp what the Russian Five ignited in me, but it seems to be a desire to pull our hockey worlds closer together, even as our nations sanction one another, threaten action and spurn dialogue.

In a few weeks, I am going back. I will stand in the same spot on Red Square where Larionov, Fetisov and Kozlov lifted the Stanley Cup. As if the strings of fate could be any more obvious, they brought it there on my birthday—August 18, 1997. I will eat an ice cream at the GUM, no matter the temperature. Maybe hum Moscow Nights on Nikolskaya and trace fading posters of Slava Fetisov on the walls of the old Spartak stadium in Sokolniki Park.

One of my favorite memories was taking my parents to see CSKA Moscow play Ak Bars Kazan on a brutal December night. "If it wasn't for you, we'd never have come here," my Dad said. Decades of fear and viewing Russians as "the other" melted in the face of reality. In so many ways we are the same, and our differences have served us, and my beloved sport, richly. If only our politicians could see it.

Whoever believes that hockey can't change the world has never met me.
And they certainly never watched the Red Wings of the nineties.