Lord, Stanley

The Vegas Golden Knights hoisted the Stanley Cup last night for their adoring, raucous, thoroughly-Vegas fans, and the question immediately occurs: When's the victory parade?

And how will you tell the difference between that and, you know, just another Tuesday in Sin City?

Las Vegas is, after all, the home office for American excess, and not just because I once had a drink there at a bar as long as a football field.  It's because everything is bigger, more gaudy, more outlandish than it needs to be or maybe even should be. It's so over the top, Everest is jealous.

So a parade?

I see sequins, a super-stretch Hummer, the Stanley Cup dressed as an Elvis impersonator (complete with shades and a pompadour). I see Conn Smythe winner Jonathan Marchessault in a top hat and a gold lame suit, holding Mike Tyson's white tiger on a leash. I see a champagne bottle the size of a howitzer leading the parade in its own custom Rolls. 

Lord, Stanley. Has your Cup ever seen anything like this?

It's been punted into a frozen canal, driven around in players' cars, visited more strip clubs than Ja Morant. It's been drunk out of a million times, been left behind in bars, and did I mention being punted into a frozen canal?

That's nothing compared to this. It's a formal tea, complete with crumpets.

Codgers and bony-fist-shakers like me may howl about Stanley winding up in Las Vegas, for God's sake, but it's a pretty remarkable story the Golden Knights have put together. In just their sixth season, they won it all, and not because they had Wayne Gretzky. Instead they had a bunch of guys nobody wanted, somehow reached the Cup Final in their first year in spite of that, and then made one shrewd move after another to build a powerhouse.

Now they're the champs. And now Vegas is a hockey town, bizarre as that sounds.

Somewhere Bugsy Siegel is wearing a Jack Eichel jersey. And telling his enforcers to go lay a cross check on that mug who won't pay up.