![]() Their list of accolades and accomplishments is impressive and frankly shocking to behold. The Lightning have done a whole lot more than just make the playoffs this season: They have owned the league. “And we know what it feels like to, to”-he pauses, seeming to search for phrasing that won’t sound cocky or jinxy-“to make the playoffs, let’s just say.” ![]() “We know how it feels to lose,” Hedman, his once-baby face now anchored by stubble, says as he reflects on the hard-won experiences and even harder losses that have defined his and Stamkos’s tenure. In each case, the team that beat them went on to hoist and smooch and mildly defile the Cup the way every little hockey player dreams of doing. The Lightning not only made a wrenching trip to the Stanley Cup final, in 2015, they also lost three different times in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals. None of them could have foreseen it, but they would all eventually join a Tampa Bay team that’s gone on to have an exhilarating and exhausting romp through the 2010s. Andrei Vasilevskiy and Nikita Kucherov, now Tampa Bay’s starting goalie and record-setting, breathtaking playmaker, respectively, were 14 and 15 years old and still sharpening their skates and skills in their native Russia. Current Lightning head coach Jon Cooper had recently left a career as a lawyer and was up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, overseeing a bunch of teens playing development league hockey for a team called the Gamblers. (How weird? That season began with Barry Melrose as the head coach, before the team started out 5-7-4 and he got canned.) The team was just a few months away from adding Hedman, a clean-cut 6-foot-6 Swedish lad, with the second pick in the 2009 draft. This time 10 years ago, Stammer-or Steven Stamkos, the first overall pick in the 2008 NHL draft, and captain of the Lightning since 2014-was finishing up a weird rookie year playing for an adrift Tampa Bay franchise. So, wanna feel old? “You know,” Hedman remarks in early March after one of the Lightning’s historic 62 regular-season wins, “especially for me and Stammer, it’s been almost a decade now. Tampa Bay Lightning defenseman Victor Hedman is only 28, but time passes differently when you’re a former whiz kid who made his NHL debut at 19.
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