Ten Year Later, Brawl Still Remebered in Hockeytown

Unless you were a fan of the Red Wings in the early 90s, you can’t imagine the heartache that was associated with the fan base. We were so close. We were there. But we just couldn’t get that big win.

There were tough game-seven losses against St Louis, Toronto and San Jose. There was the 1995 season where the Wings won the presidents cup and breezed through the Stanley Cup Finals, only to be swept by New Jersey. But the worst was the 1996 Western Conference Finals.

We watched as our Wings won an NHL-record 62 games that season. We felt it, we though it was our time. But then we ran into Colorado and lost in six games. To add insult to injury in that clinching game Claude Lemieux put a dirty hit on Kris Draper, causing Draper to spend the summer sipping milkshakes while his jaw was wired shut. Already hated in Detroit, Lemieux quickly became public enemy No. 1.

Fast forward to March 26, 1997. The mention date alone still gives me the chills. The hated Avs were coming into Joe Louis Arena. All over the state of Michigan you could feel the rivalry. Eighteen minutes and twenty-two seconds into the game, all hell broke loose.

It started out with a fight between the Wings Igor Larionov and the Avs Peter Forsberg, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Next thing you know Drapers roommate, Darren McCarty is pounding away at Lemieux. And he wasn’t stopping. McCarty implemented Draper’s revenge and kept pounding away even as Lemieux turtled. Colorado goaltender Patrick Roy skated to center ice to help out Lemieux, but was intercepted by Brendan Shanahan. Then Red Wings goalie Mike Vernon met Roy at center ice and the two goalies started going at it. Just from that incident alone, seven players were penalized for a total of 34 minutes. And it didn’t stop with that. There were a total of nine fights throughout the game. By the end, both teams had racked up a total of 148 penalty minutes.

The end of the game came 39 seconds into over time when McCarty, who had sent Lemieux to the locker room in the first period, scored the game winning goal, giving Detroit a 6-5 win.

“I can't believe it was 10 years ago,” McCarty said in a Detroit Free Press article. “It'll never replace that winning-the-cup game and scoring that goal, but to take just a game in general, (the March 26, 1997, contest) was the greatest game I've ever played in, that I ever saw. Just because it had every ingredient you could ever want. That game had everything.”

That was the day Hockeytown was truly born. There was a new swagger in Wings fans. We no longer thought we’d win the Stanley Cup, we now knew we were going to win the cup.

And that June, for the first time in 42 years, Detroit was the home of the Stanley Cup Champions. All the heartache that came before was erased when the final horn of game four sounded in Joe Louis Arena, giving the Wings a sweep over Philadelphia.

For a sports fan living in Michigan, it would be very hard to top 1997. Not only did the cup call our state home, but that fall the Michigan Football team went undefeated to win the National Championship. Even our Lions made the NFL playoffs behind a 2000-yard rushing season by Barry Sanders.

But perhaps the greatest day of that year was on March 26. It was the day everything changed. It was the day we could be proud of our hockey team. It was the day we could call them our Red Wings.