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Editor's Note: First in a six-part series. The 1991 Stanley Cup Final started on May 15, and the 1992 Final Four came to a conclusion on April 6. A Minnesota team or venue was involved in those two major events and three more in between. What a run. We will look back at that stretch of Minnesota sports history each day this week.
The adventure started with B.E. Taylor's elongated national anthem in Pittsburgh before Game 1 of the 1991 Stanley Cup Final and it ended 328 days later with the sounds of Michigan's Fab Five clanking Metrodome rims in the second half (29% shooting) to conclude the 1992 Final Four.
When Minnesota's wondrous turn as the center of American sports ended on April 6, 1992, reporters from the Star Tribune and across the nation hustled to beat deadlines for our last-chance print editions.
It was midnight, perhaps a few minutes after, when we were packing up in the Metrodome's large, makeshift media room.
A 46-year-old sportswriter looked at his Strib colleagues and said:
"The only thing we're missing now would be the chance to host the Kentucky Derby."
The Twins arrived in Bloomington in 1961 and visiting sportswriters marveled at seeing working farms just beyond the parking lot in center field.
Thirty years after the Twins and the Vikings made us big-league in our beloved erector set, Met Stadium, we found ourselves bigger than all the rest for 10 months and three weeks:
• 65th Stanley Cup Final, May 15-25, 1991, North Stars vs. Pittsburgh, with three games at Met Center. Penguins win series 4-2.
• 91st U.S. Open, June 13-17, 1991, Hazeltine National in Chaska. Payne Stewart wins 18-hole Monday playoff vs. Scott Simpson.
• 88th World Series, Oct. 19-27, 1991, Twins vs. Atlanta, with four games at the Metrodome. Twins win series 4-3.
• 26th Super Bowl, Jan. 26, 1992, Metrodome. Washington 37, Buffalo 24.
• 54th NCAA men's Final Four, April 4-6, 1992, Metrodome. Duke (champion), Michigan, Cincinnati and Indiana.
Among these five events, there were two "Minnesota miracles," an early look at the relentless transformation of college basketball, the greatest Minnesota games (back-to-back) of my lifetime and one event that to this day changed our sports market.
The miracles: The North Stars, No. 16 among 21 NHL teams in regular-season points, leading the Stanley Cup Final 2-1 in late May. And, Vikings CEO Mike Lynn's political maneuvering inside the NFL to make possible a Super Bowl landing in our low-budget Dome with roughly the same amenities as the Oakland Coliseum.
The transformation: Michigan's Fab Five reaching the title game as freshmen before losing 71-51 to Duke. Winning coach Mike Krzyzewski was still lauding the importance of "his seniors" then, but he is now winding down his Duke career as the elder king of "one-and-dones" for the last dozen seasons.
Greatest games of all: Kirby Puckett's Game 6 and Jack Morris' Game 7 for the Twins, of course, on those late October nights with the Hankies waving and the thunder rolling down.
Long-term effects of these?
The North Stars were in Dallas two years later and the NHL was gone in Minnesota for seven.
It took an upgrade from a Dome that originally cost $55 million to our current one costing $1.15 billion (and with bad tiles) to get another Super Bowl in 2018.
The Twins were lobbying for a new ballpark five years after World Series title No. 2, threatening contraction within a decade, and settling for a stadium without a roof in order to open Target Field in 2010.
We had another Final Four in the old dome (Duke, again), we had one in 2019 (no Duke) in the new dome, but since Clem Haskins went down in what in current times seems almost comical as a scandal, men's college basketball basically has been blasé around here for two decades.
It was fun while it lasted, from May 15, 1991, to April 6, 1992, but it didn't really have lasting power.
Except for the U.S. Open. That's the success that has kept on giving.
A big swing
Minnesota lost its regular tournament stop (St. Paul Open, then Minnesota Classic) after 1969. The U.S. Golf Association granted its grandest event, the U.S. Open, to Hazeltine National for 1970.
The course opened in the Chaska countryside in 1962 and remained way too immature as a track to be hosting the most major of championships.
Extensive changes to the layout were made in the 1980s with USGA guidance and through the efforts of new Hazeltine leaders. The club got its second chance in 1991.
The players approved, to the degree that golfers allow themselves to do that.
We showed up 40,000 strong every day. We ravaged the merchandise tent. You couldn't swivel your head in the seven-county area without seeing an Open article of clothing.
And when there was an 18-hole playoff on Monday, a happening that had drawn 5,000 or fewer fans in other cities, we had 30,000-plus show up on their Sunday tickets to watch a twosome, Stewart and Simpson, play golf.
Or a poor facsimile of such.
Simpson tanked in the last three holes and Stewart won the playoff 75 to 77.
"Those Minnesota people are nuts for big-time golf," reported the national golf media, adding, "Hazeltine is now a true test."
Hollis Cavner worked that tournament in operations. He teamed with locals to start the Burnet Senior Classic in 1993, which became the 3M Championship, which is now the 3M Open, an annual PGA Tour stop coming up at TPC Twin Cities for the third time later this month.
There have been two PGA Championships at Hazeltine, both with Tiger Woods, both gangbusters at the gate. A Ryder Cup was held in 2016 that was insane, and it will return in 2029.
The "Big H," or the "Big Dog," take your pick, will become the first U.S. course to host two Ryder Cups.
Credit for this goes to the '91 Open — and yourself, if you happened among those 30,000 trying to watch a twosome play 18 holes, and not very well.
11 months of memories
A month earlier, the second Stanley Cup Final appearance for the North Stars had arrived from outer space.
There was only a 20% chance to miss the playoffs with four of five teams in each division qualifying. Toronto was so terrible the Stars had no choice but to make it, with a 27-39-14 record and 68 points.
The top of the Norris Division (famously, the "Snore-Us" for ESPN's Chris Berman) had Chicago with 106 points and St. Louis with 105. Those were the highest totals in the NHL, mostly due to Detroit, the Stars and Leafs representing 60% of the division.
The North Stars, led by phlegmatic coach Bob Gainey, upset Chicago first, then the Blues — finishing both in a Game 6 in front of a fanatical crowd that included many young, thirsty folks who had warmed up by tailgating in the Met Center lots.
Post-Gretzky Edmonton was easy in the Western finals, falling to the by-now unconscious Stars in five games.
In Pittsburgh, Pens fans were so hard up for an excuse for the 5-4 opening loss that there were bitter complaints that Taylor's ultralong anthem took the life out of the home crowd.
The Stars led the series again after a Game 3 victory at Met Center, which Mario Lemieux missed because of a bad back. Mario the Great returned and sanity prevailed, with the Penguins winning three in a row, including 8-0 in the Game 6 clincher.
And there was Bob Johnson, Herbie Brooks' old rival from Wisconsin, down there on the ice as the winning coach, smiling like a honey badger.
Then came the Open and we kicked back for a while, as the Twins made the last-to-first journey complete. They cruised to the AL West title by eight games, and then defeated the best team they played in either the 1987 or 1991 postseason — Toronto — by 4-1 in the ALCS.
And then, later in October, Jack Buck was telling an ever-growing TV audience, "And, we'll see you tomorrow night," and 30 years later … still goose bumps for Twins fans.
The pair of big events that followed in 1992 were not intensely personal, as were the World Series, the Stanley Cup, and even the U.S. Open, what with the size of the gallery always being a major issue in golf.
Plus, the older generations of Minnesota boosters wanted to see Hazeltine get off the hook for the past disparagements.
Compared with the tribute to excess we saw with the 2018 Super Bowl in the ZygiDome (a tribute to excess in itself), the 1992 Super Bowl was an interesting interruption of winter that proved only that Washington coach Joe Gibbs could win with anybody playing quarterback.
As for the Fab Five, Chris Webber stayed two years at Michigan, Jalen Rose and Juwan Howard stayed three, and Jimmy King and Ray Jackson stayed all four.
Michigan lost two straight title games: here vs. Duke, being outscored 41-20 in the second half, and in 1993 in New Orleans vs. North Carolina when Webber called an infamous timeout that the Wolverines didn't have.
The NCAA later vacated those efforts due to some financial shenanigans with a booster, but we must ask three decades later:
How much could the Fab Five — particularly Webber, Rose and Howard — have made if allowed to market their likenesses and keep the dough?
We didn't know it, but the Fab Five was giving us a look 30 years into the future, and that was power to the players.
