| IT'S A MEMORY I'LL ALWAYS CHERISH. After struggling most of Game 7, the CALGARY FLAMES revved it up one last time. The team was in Tampa Bay; I was 4,600 km away at the Pengrowth Saddledome, watching the game on giant TV screens along with my wife and our sons, Julian, 10, and Daniel, 11, and more than 15,000 red-clad hockey nuts. In a surreal scene, the fans stood and cheered, did the wave and taunted Tampa's brilliant goalie, Nikolai Khabibulin - as if their psychic vibes might be felt in distant Florida, spurring the Flames to score that crucial tying goal. I looked at my sons, who had joined in, saw the feral joy in their their faces. Magic. In the storybook version, the one we all imagined, a Flames marksman connects with seconds to spare, the team clinches it in overtime and Jarome Iginla hoists the Stanley Cup. But know what? Reality ain't so bad. Calgarians like to think of themselves as can-do optimists and last week they lived up to the billing. No post-game riot. Little second-guessing on the radio (except, of course, of the refs). Lots of appreciation for how a hard-working, star-deprived group of castoffs and could-bes made one of the most improbable Cup runs in NHL history - and came oh, so close, to pulling it off. Sure, there was disappointment, even tears, but by the time some 30,000 people - many of them kids enjoying a bit of sanctioned hooky - converged on CALGARY's Olympic Plaza for a noon-time rally last Wednesday, all negative thoughts had been banished. "They're winners in our hearts," said Terhi Lantela, brandishing a Flames flag and with her young nephew and niece in toe. "They got the whole city excited. It's been amazing." The feeling was mutual. The entire Flames squad showed up, standing on stage decked in red jerseys and white cowboy hats while fans chanted, for one last time this season, "Go Flames, Go!" Iginla, the captain, spoke with obvious emotion. "This is truly unbelievable," he said. "You guys helped make this year and this run the time of our lives." The rally was a fitting finish to a two-month-long love-in that civic boosters say could pay big dividends. "You can't buy this kind of publicity," says Richard White, executive director of the Calgary Downtown Association. White is talking about the images beamed across North America and abroad of a city in thrall to its hockey team. A place where it seemed every second vehicle boasted a Flames flag and where thousands streamed along 17th Avenue - dubbed "The Red Mile" - to celebrate every victory or commiserate over each loss. "It's shown Calgary as a young, exciting place to be," says White. In some cases, perhaps a tad too exciting, as evidenced by the now-infamous Web sites documenting female Flames fans baring all, giving Calgary more international exposure than any chuckwagon race ever did. While the Cup run was great for the late-teen and twentysomething Red Mile revellers, its most lasting impact will be on the team's even younger admirers. Their enthusiasm was everywhere. At a piano recital where a boy who played like a prodigy betrayed another passion by proudly wearing his Flames jersey. At a community league soccer match where the kids kept an ear cocked to a radio broadcast of that night's playoff game. Or in the faces of my sons in the dying minutes of that heart-wrenching final. Tampa may have the Cup, but this sheer love of hockey - they can never take that away.
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