And the Cup goes to ...

Ah, well. So much for storylines.

So much for the Edmonton Oilers becoming the first Canadian team in three decades to bring the Stanley Cup back to its ancestral home, and so much for them becoming only the second team in history to come back from a three-games-to-none deficit in the Stanley Cup Final to win the Cup.

The Florida Panthers wrecked both scenarios in Game 7, winning 2-1 back in south Florida after somehow finding the defensive mojo they lost somewhere between games 3 and 4. Goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky stood on his head, the D threw a lasso around Connor McDavid and Co., and the Panthers won the Cup for the first time in their relatively brief history.

Hooray for them. Hooray for south Florida. And hooray for the '42 Toronto Maple Leafs, who remain the only team in NHL history to go down 3-0 in the Final and come back to win Stanley.

May they all be popping champagne cork to celebrate, somewhere in this world or the next.

As for the Panthers, they dodged the infamy of being the second team in history to lose the Cup after leading the Final 3-0, so you figure there must have been a sigh of relief when the clock hit zeroes last night. OK, so there were probably multiple sighs of relief.

And the Oilers? 

Well, McDavid won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the playoff MVP, a rarity for a player from the losing team. I'm sure his name will look snazzy on it and all, but you know he'd have rather had his name on the trophy the Panthers were carting around the ice.

Nonetheless, the Oilers get the lion's share of the credit for rescuing the Final from the pale clutches of "meh", and turning it into one of the more memorable Finals in recent history. And Game 7 was as Game 7-ish as it gets.

So hooray for hockey, too. Once more, it proved the truth of one of the most immutable laws in sports: It does the playoffs better than anyone.