Hurricane force

By Mark Barden

Carolina are the new-look NHL's first champions

Edmonton fans must be thinking there really is no justice in the world after seeing Carolina lift the Stanley Cup.

Hockey is a way of life for the Oilers' fanatical supporters, reared on the exploits of Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier's title-winning teams of the 1980s.

How apt it would have been, after the NHL lost an entire season to a salary cap dispute, to see one of the league's most successful teams restore its tarnished reputation with a sixth title.

Well, that's how they saw it in Alberta, anyway.

Instead, Edmonton were beaten by an outfit that has only been in existence since 1999 and plays in a region where ice hockey still has a curiosity value.

Since the Hartford Whalers relocated to Raleigh, NC, seven years ago, the Hurricanes have battled to compete with college basketball and Nascar.

But, despite, last season's labour woes, they could be on the verge of establishing a hockey tradition.

Cheer up, there's always next season

Carolina captain Rod Brind'Amour said: "Hockey has been here six, seven years. It didn't exist as a sport before, so it's come a long way.

"It's a small town, small-town feel, but you know we're entrenched in the community now and we're becoming a big part of it."

In a way, the NHL has picked up where it left off before its damaging salary cap row.

The last team to win the Stanley Cup before the players were locked out were the Tampa Bay Lightning - another small, new-ish, southern US franchise.

But the league's small-market teams have all benefited from the new salary capping rules, which have levelled the NHL playing field like a Zamboni ice resurfacing machine.

A much-needed revamp of hockey's rules has also helped arrest the sport's fading appeal outside of its northern US/Canadian heartland.

Mindful that defensive tactics were slowly killing interest, the NHL has created more attacking play and scoring opportunities.

Some Oilers fans got a little carried away during the finals

Outside of that heartland, hockey is never realistically going to be anything less than a poor fourth behind the NFL, the NBA and Major League Baseball.

But Carolina's success shows it need not spiral into a terminal decline away from those hockeytowns where Lord Stanley's Cup is sport's Holy Grail.

Which brings us right back to Edmonton, where almost all the 900,000-plus residents seem to know someone connected to the Oilers' organisation.

And with Canada's oil industry experiencing a bit of a boom, all but one regular season game at the city's 16,839-seat Rexall Place was a sell-out.

The team's success this season occasionally resulted in over-exuberance, with supporters gathering along Whytes Avenue starting fires, smashing windows, and getting themselves arrested.

Carolina fans haven't got into going that crazy yet, although they made plenty of noise at the RBC Center as the 'Canes reached their second finals (they lost in 2002 to Detroit).

But the true test for their triumphant team - and the revamped NHL itself - is whether they can repeat that success next season.