She laughs about it now. Or as much as you can laugh when you’ve lost most of the feeling in your body from the chest down.
“I think we are in such a state right now where it’s just a crazy world, we’re so divided on things,” Avalanche fan Ruby Cates said by phone from her room on the third floor of Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins. “Yet even the little things can bring people closer together.”
While the Avs were busy decimating the NHL the last eight weeks en route to snatching the Stanley Cup, Cates was receiving treatment for a neurological issue and a recent hernia.
“And when I was having my hardest days in rehab, the Avs were in the (title) chase,” she said of the NHL champs, whose theurgic postseason run finished with a 4-2 series win over Tampa Bay in the Stanley Cup Final on Sunday night. “It gave me something to look forward to.”
Something to take her mind off reality. If only for a couple hours a night.
One of Cates’ text chains over the weekend, she recalled, involved a fervent discussion of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
Five minutes later, another text popped up.
GO AVS GO!
“We live in a divided world,” Cates said. “But for Denver and the state of Colorado, this brings us together.”
***
No Roe. No Wade. No red. No blue. No protests. Just the best dang hockey team on the planet, kicking tail, taking names, and bringing everybody along for the ride.
“You know, I was there in (Ball Arena) when you could get in (to an Avs game) for 10 bucks,” another Avalanche fan, Kegan Charles, recalled as he joined the postgame parties in LoDo late Sunday night.
“I mean, no one wanted to go. And now the Cup means everything.”
For the last eight weeks, the 2022 Stanley Cup champs got us to stop fretting about the big things long enough to sing Blink-182’s “All the Small Things” ‘til we were gloriously hoarse.
By the time Charles hit 20th and Market, a pack of giddy revelers had formed in the intersection, almost all wearing some form of Avs gear, buttressed by a wall of police.
An orange traffic barrel bounced above a mosh pit the way a beach ball does at a summer festival, bopping from one unseen set of hands to another. Then another. Then another. At least two street signs were disemboweled. A giant ROAD CLOSED warning surfed the crowd.
“AVS IN SIX! AVS IN SIX!” they cried an hour after the Avs had dispatched the Lightning, the two-time defending NHL champion, by a score of 2-1, clinching Denver’s first Stanley Cup since 2001.
“(EXPLETIVE) TAMPA BAY! (EXPLETIVE) TAMPA BAY!”
While fireworks blasted above him, Charles brandished an inflatable replica of the Stanley Cup over his head as he kangarooed into the fray.
“The (Avs’) Cup (win) in 2001, I couldn’t truly appreciate it,” Charles explained. “But now I can. Yeah, it means the world to us.”
He came looking to share, to pass his faux Cup the way Avs captain Gabe Landeskog had passed the real thing to friend and teammate Erik Johnson a short time earlier.
“Oooooh, can I have the honors?” an older man with a long beard asked Charles.
For a second, they held that replica Cup together on Market. Strangers embracing the moment.
“It’s a melting pot at the Avs games,” Charles said. “And no one gives a (expletive) where you stand politically, sexually. It’s a very welcoming culture.”
It brings us together.
“Yeah,” Charles replied. “It’s kind of cool.”
———
You want to talk cool?
A few quiet blocks away, directly across the street from the first-base gate at Coors Field, Andrew Jeffries danced down Blake Street wearing a nifty suit — jacket, pants, the whole shebang — made up entirely of the Avs’ logo.
“Took me a couple months to make it,” the Denverite explained. “I just felt some inspiration.”
Enough to weave in a linen interior. Oh, and silk on the inside of the jacket.
“When I made this, it was probably after the Vegas loss (in the ’21 Cup playoffs),” Jeffries said, recalling the sting of 13 months earlier. “These guys have been working their butts off.”
And here’s the best part: The Avs haven’t lost a playoff series since he finished his passion project.
“This is the lucky suit,” laughed Jeffries, who’s in the garment business.
“There’s a lot of stuff going on right now regarding politics, controversies, life, COVID, whatever. At the end of the day, we’re here to root for the Avalanche.
“It’s great to see that. I mean, it (stinks) to have all that division, but at the end of the day, this is something that brings everybody together, you know?”
———
Burgundy and blue. One tribe. One heartbeat. One trophy. One town.
“It means everything,” Cates said. “They just brought joy to so many people in a not-so-great world.
“I always felt like I won with them, I lost with them. I am in intense pain all day. I try every day to get better. This makes me better. During the darkest times, I always had my Avs.”
She always had hope, even though she can’t feel much on the outside from the chest down. Even though movement is a chore without the aid of a walker. Even though every day involves at least three hours of physical therapy.
“If you prick me with a needle, I can’t feel it,” the Fort Collins resident said. “It’s made me really, really weak.
“It’s been crazy. But thank God I’ve been able to watch the Avs though it all.”
Heck, Cates says she’s even got everybody in the rehab unit invested now. Doctors. Nurses. Staff. The lot.
“It was the thing that brought me joy,” she said. “I went through a divorce, and hockey was the thing that got me (through) when everything else was turning on its head.
“You know, when you’re happy, you work harder. You work harder, you get better.”
Cates was so happy Sunday that she could’ve screamed loud enough to wake the third floor. And the fourth.
“I couldn’t yell, so quietly I kept saying, “I can’t believe it,’” Cates recalled.
“Then my phone started going off. People were trying to call me and text me. I don’t know how I’ll sleep.”
Like a champ. Eventually.
