Colageo: Boston Bruins Game Night Calls from Afar

The Boston Bruins hear you calling, and so do we.

When the temperature dipped below 70F on Saturday night, it occurred to me that, while we’re still in July, September and October aren’t that far away.

I dream of the next game night. I cannot see you pouring down the stairs on your way out of TD Garden, but your voices momentarily flash like flickers of sunlight through the seam in the elevator doors and floors especially as we pass Levels 7 and 4. When the 9-to-3 express completes its postgame run and stops, we spill out of the elevator and onto event level.

The noise follows us right through the walls.

“Wooooo!”

The fun part of all this is media types like myself board that ride at the first note of “Dirty Water.” Therefore, we are pinned to the back wall of the elevator as we stare forward at the back of motionless heads (I’ve involuntarily memorized many NHL executives’ bald spots). Home and away management share the ride and, win or lose, the silence is deafening.

That’s where you come in, speaking out your emotions like a vicarious consciousness for the lemmings stuffed into that short ride that on some nights can seem so long. If I feel the vibe and try in vain to hide my grin, how much more so those men in black whose lives and families, not just livelihoods, are totally wrapped around that result.

You speak and we listen, so they definitely listen.

They may stand still, barely breathing during our collective free fall from press level, but inside they’re bouncing off those walls that reverberate.

“Wooooo!”

As a chronicler of the Boston Bruins’ fortunes, I long for the days that were commonplace only a dozen years ago.
You’ve left the arena, and the bullgang working 90 feet below is putting together the floor for the Celtics. “Beep, beep, beep,” the flatbed carts carry numbered floorboards into prescribed areas for rapid installation. Then the parquet itself. All hands are on deck. The teamwork is amazing.

For the writers meeting deadlines from their assigned game seats rather than from the media workroom downstairs, those little flatbed trucks are our soundtrack for deep playoff runs and last-minute flight plans. It’s music to our ears.

Is this the year?

Some people think the Boston Bruins, minus half of the goalie hug and minus Jake DeBrusk’s opportunistic strikes, are headed downhill. I don’t understand the logic.

What hockey team spends most of a season in first place and contends for the Presidents Trophy with only one established centerman? Not many, and this one just went out and got another established centerman and a hardnosed defenseman, not to mention a few brutes for the bottom six.

Any team can go off the rails for a number of reasons, but for the purposes of roster architecture, this Boston Bruins team is already better than last year.

And now, for the asterisk.

As the dog days drain away absent of an announcement that the Boston Bruins and Jeremy Swayman have, in fact, reached an accord on a career deal for the star netminder, it’s ironically the graybeards that are getting most anxious.

Typically, older fans provide a voice of reason at times like this. When panic strikes Bruins Nation, they’re the ones who would love to use that “SMH” emoji if only they could find it on their smartphones. But this is not the old timers’ sentiment in Swayman’s case, and do you know why?

We don’t all go back to Gerry Cheevers’ 1972 jump to the World Hockey Association, but Andrew Raycroft’s Calder Trophy season was only 20 years ago.

Primarily known these days as a studio analyst for Boston Bruins telecasts on the team’s NESN flagship and one half of the Morning Bru podcast with Billy Jaffe, “Razor” (wasn’t it originally spelled Rayzor?) was the team’s best goaltending prospect since future Conn Smythe Trophy winner Bill Ranford (1986-88, 1996-97).

I don’t blame Razor if he’d rather forget how he and Nick Boynton were victimized by the Boston Bruins’ botched, 2004-05 lockout strategy.

Club owner Jeremy Jacobs once told me the Bruins were only following with Commissioner Gary Bettman told all teams to do to prepare for a salary-cap world, but once the NHL Players Association’s counteroffer of a 24% across-the-board rollback was incorporated by the league into the inaugural $39.5 million salary cap, powerhouse teams like the Detroit Red Wings were suddenly able to keep their squads intact for the 2005-06 season.

The Bruins had let several veteran contracts expire and, prepared for a rush at newly available talent, GM Mike O’Connell was instead sent scrambling like a grocery shopper at 6 pm on Super Bowl Sunday.

As a result, enigmatic Islander Brad Isbister, for example, was the new Mike Knuble (big body with a right shot on the left wing). Elite, New England-born skaters Brian Leetch and Shawn McEachern gave it one more go, and journeymen on the back nine like Alexei Zhamnov would make appearances in black and gold.

The season didn’t start well, and thus the Joe Thornton blockbuster with San Jose. But the overshadowed fallout was the downfall of Boston’s top two restricted free agents, Raycroft and Nick Boynton.

Raycroft had been NHL Rookie of the Year for 2003-04. Boynton, whose rocky development curve was righted by a full 2000-01 season of do-it-all hockey in AHL Providence, had been a top-three staple on the Boston blue line for three years running when the league locked out the players for the entire 2004-05 season to get its long-desired salary cap.

Neither player had a productive lockout year, and as last-minute, take-it-or-leave-it RFA’s, neither carried any momentum back to the Boston Bruins’ 2005-06 training camp.

Both integral to the Bruins’ fortunes, neither was a Bruin by the time Peter Chiarelli officially replaced O’Connell as GM.

Now visionary for the Montreal Canadiens, interim Bruins GM Jeff Gorton played a major transitional role, doing Chiarelli’s bidding while the latter was still working for the Ottawa Senators through the 2005 NHL Draft and the free-agent signing period that famously yielded Marc Savard and Zdeno Chara in that order.

Boynton went to Arizona for homegrown defenseman Paul Mara and Raycroft to Toronto for the rights to a Finnish goalie prospect named Tuukka Rask.

It’s no wonder some older Bruins fans are getting nervous about this Swayman situation. The situations are not comparable, but neither fans nor players forget the bad stuff.

Finally, will Delaware North buy the Boston Celtics? It’s only right that Bobby Orr share his featured spot out front of the TD Garden escalators with the late, great Bill Russell, and this is the one way that could happen.