STANLEY CUP FINALS : Beverly Thrillbillies Go to Town

Onward and upward.

If it’s Monday, this must be Quebec. Hopscotching the provinces of Canada, our brave little traveling band of California tourists has enjoyed sight-seeing from Alberta to British Columbia to Ontario, and now wanders along its merry way to majestic and historic Montreal, home of hockey’s royal family, Les Habitants, and hosts this week to the fresh princes of Tinseltown.

Canadiens vs. Kings.

The Habs vs. the Hab-Nots.

No south-of-the-border team has ever cut a playoff swath through the Great White North the way this Los Angeles team has. First, Calgary. Next, Vancouver. Then, Toronto.

“Oh, you know us, we like to do things nobody’s done before and go places nobody’s gone before,” Coach Barry Melrose said Sunday.

To which Wayne Gretzky chimed in:

“Thank goodness there’s no team in Prince Edward Island. We’d have to take the Concorde or something.”

No way, King Wayne. This thing has gone far enough.

Last stop, Quebec.

Back in L.A., if you asked people on the street what they knew about Quebec, some would probably answer: “Isn’t he the host of “Jeopardy?”

They might never have been up here in hockey heaven.

Ever since the formation of the National Hockey League in 1917, the Montreal Canadiens have won 22 Stanley Cups. And furthermore, the official count is 23, because Montreal also won the Cup in 1916, before there even was such a thing as an NHL. This was back when everyone’s sticks were made of wood and you didn’t have helmets, you had heads.

The Canadiens captured that other Stanley Cup right between the Vancouver Millionaires of 1915 and the Seattle Metropolitans of 1917.

Oh, and they might have won one in ‘19, too, if it wasn’t for that dratted influenza.

Or was that the year of the Black Skate scandal?

Anyway, and then we have the L.A. Kings, winners of zero Stanley Cups, coming to town like hillbillies to Beverly Hills, the nouveau riche of the NHL, modeling gaudy diamond rings on the fingers of Gretzky and Jari Kurri and Charlie Huddy and Pat Conacher and Marty McSorley, but otherwise dressed up for Lord Stanley’s ball like a pack of rowdy party-crashers, drawing harrumphs from the old socialites and dowagers who stare at them as if to say: “How in the world did you people get invitations?”

By earning them, that’s how.

You don’t come here to the heart of hockey and take apart Canadian team after Canadian team without knowing what you’re doing, without belonging. The Kings have finally arrived, is what it all boils down to. The Kings aren’t the Kings any more. They aren’t the casual little Hollywood hockey team that others around the league make sport of, the team good for a laugh but not to be taken seriously. As Melrose once put it, Los Angeles was thought of “as a place where hockey players go to die.”

Not any more. Not after Saturday night’s 5-4 scrapbook-saver at Maple Leaf Gardens, where the Kings came into another of hockey’s old haunted mansions, looked the ghosts of Stanley Cup Champions Past directly in the eyeballs and never blinked. Toronto wasn’t prepared for that. Gags galore were made at L.A.’s expense, about “Malibu haircuts,” whatever they are, or about “laid-back defense,” whatever that is, or about “beach-blanket hockey fans,” ha, ha, ha.

These are the jokes, folks. Because nobody in California would know the difference between Rob Blake and Toe Blake, right? Because nobody in California would know the difference between a faceoff and a face lift, right? Because nobody in California would know the difference between Jean Beliveau and Jean-Claude Van Damme, right? Sure thing, dude. Boom-Boom Geoffrion? Wasn’t she a stripper? God forbid somebody in the western United States of America should actually be able to identify Gump Worsley.

L.A. ain’t Montreal when it comes to hockey.

Not yet.

But we’re getting there.

In fact, we are there.

It’s time for the Habs vs. the Hab-Nots, a best-of-seven series that will take us from the most ancient civilization of ice hockey to the new frontier, to Forums colonial and modern, from the Ice Age to the New Wave, and to a couple of cities where, it could be reasonably argued, English is not necessarily the favored language. Well, you know what they say in L.A. when it comes to ice. Go with the floe.