The Pride line up for the national anthem prior to a regular season game against Hamilton
Sometimes it can take a little bit of time for something to set in, whether that’s success or failure, it’s not always as simple as it happens and then feeling it. Dominik Winters and the San Francisco Pride had been feeling a lot of that all season. It was one of the most successful regular seasons in franchise history, but outside of San Francisco, no one talked about it. This could be seen, of course, in the glut of articles on ESPN and The Athletic (among others of course) that had various titles like “Why San Francisco Will Never Win the Challenge Cup” or “San Francisco Pride: Worst Top Seed in the Modern Era.” As a 50-win team with the most goals scored out of any team in the league, there were some in the San Francisco locker room who bristled at those headlines. “You know, it’s not something that we actively go seek out in terms of reading a headline, but you know, people talk be it our families or our friends,” said third year center Dominik Winters, “It’s not something that we put too much stock into, we know who we’ve got in the locker room and what we can do.”
Winters was one of a few players who echoed a similar sentiment when discussing last season for the Pride, most following a similar line of “We heard, we just don’t care.” And that showed in the playoffs. The Pride ran over the hapless Chicago Syndicate in the first round, winning 8-3 and 6-3 in San Francisco, before handing down an otherworldly beatdown in Game 3 back in Chicago, winning 13-2. They would go on to finish the sweep with an 8-3 win in Game 4. Those games seemed to show that perhaps the locker room was right, they really did have what it took and while Chicago wasn’t exactly the stoutest of opponents, the way they dispatched them showed few struggles after dominating in the regular season. “The closest game was a 3-goal differential! They outscored them 35 to 11 in just 4 games!” Pride supporters could be heard saying after the first round, the team also growing in confidence.
This confidence continued in the first two games of the second round against in-state rivals, the Los Angeles Panthers. A 6-5 overtime win at home in Game 1 perhaps revealed some concerns, but the Pride came back with an incisive 8-3 win in Game 2 on the back of a hat trick from former 1st Overall Pick Levin Schattenaxt. Again, the Pride seemed that they were silencing the concerns of the sports world before the playoffs really started. Then Game 3 happened. San Francisco's goal scorers, which to this point had put in 49 goals in 6 games, got absolutely stifled. They could only manage 19 shots (while giving up 43) and 0 goals in a 4-0 shutout loss. Their electric offense simply didn’t get off the bus. The Pride said all the right things after that game, lots of hockey-isms about getting the puck on net, winning puck battles, doing things the right way.
Game 4 did bring a better performance, but the result was much of the same: a 5-4 overtime loss that didn’t really reflect how much better the Panthers played than the Pride. A 53-29 shot difference and 15 turnovers by the Pride and they were lucky to come out of Los Angeles with any sort of confidence; despite knowing they had home ice advantage and as many as two more games at home in the series. If you couldn’t tell by now, the Pride’s second round series against the Panthers was an absolute war between two teams who don’t particularly like each other and had been two of the strongest in the league during the regular season, San Francisco finishing 2nd with a 50-12-4 record and Los Angeles finishing 3rd with a 50-14-2 record. At this point, some of those writers, who had been crowing about how undeserving and bad the Pride were going into the playoffs, started to talk again.
San Francisco came out vigorously in Game 3. They handled business with a 6-0 win that both the team and their fans hoped would be a knockout punch, giving the Pride a 3-2 series lead heading back to Los Angeles for Game 6. But once again, the Panthers got up off the mat and counterpunched at home, winning 7-3 to force a winner-take-all Game 7 back in San Francisco. At this point, the Pride felt confident, they had only lost 4 games at home all season, and not once at home in the playoffs. Yet, it was the Panthers who came out strong to start Game 7, jumping out to a 1-0 lead after just a minute on a goal from Derek Martin and a 2-0 lead by the end of the first period with Axel Kirby. It took until the last 5 minutes of the second before the Pride started to look like themselves, with Viktor Hargreeves getting them on the board. It didn’t last long though, as Derek Martin would bury his second of the night restoring the 2-goal lead for the Panthers. Luke Laraque would give the Pride a lifeline at the end of the second, scoring with 1:46 left to cut the gap to 1 goal and the entire third to play.
Playoff hockey has a way of making unlikely heroes out of players, and the third period was no different. As the sports media at the game started working on their “I told you so” articles during the second intermission, the Pride were being asked to look in the mirror and determine how they want their season to end and how they want to be remembered as a team. This pushed the right buttons apparently as the Pride came out flying in the third, on their way to 23 shots as they looked for an equalizer. It would come after 8 minutes and from the stick of David Doug, scorer of 6 goals in the regular season. 3 minutes later, Mercedes Bayle (with an assist from Doug) would make it 4-3 and the Pride weren’t about to take their foot off the gas. Hargreeves would get his second on the penalty kill, and Pride fans everywhere collectively let out the breath they didn’t know they were holding. David Doug would score again with 51 seconds left to put the icing on the cake with his fourth point and second goal, setting up a final score of 6-3, and the Pride could start looking to their next series against the Winnipeg Aurora.
The media, of course, was thrilled! The Pride had shown cracks, arguably for the first time all year and certainly the first time in these playoffs. Their path didn’t appear much easier from here, as the Aurora had just knocked off the Texas Renegades, a team who had finished just 8 points behind San Francisco, and looming on the Eastern Conference side was the President’s Trophy winning Baltimore Platoon (assuming they would handle the 39-point worse Hamilton Steelhawks) in the Eastern Conference Final. The Pride’s struggles against the Panthers didn’t fully answer any questions, especially when they couldn’t buy a win on the road in Los Angeles. Sure, they won two at Chicago, but the Syndicate are a much different team than Los Angeles, Winnipeg, or Baltimore.
With that said, would you believe it if I told you that the Western Conference Final started the same as the previous round for San Francisco? A pair of two goal wins at home in Games 1 and 2, and Pride fans could be forgiven for thinking about their first trip to the Challenge Cup Final since S52. Then they laid an egg in Game 3. A 4-1 loss that saw the Aurora goalie make 34 saves on 35 shots and had people wondering if there was going to be a repeat of the last series where the Pride came out flying only to fall apart on the road. Game 4, however, was different this time around. Winning their first game on the road since Game 4 of the first round against Chicago, the Pride again won a 2-goal game, a 4-2 win that saw San Francisco dominate the game for long stretches of play. After that, it was too much to expect Winnipeg to be able to mount what would have been a memorable comeback. Back at home, the Pride won a dominant 5-2 Game 5, out shooting the Aurora 44-23 and playing a strong game.
Even with their place booked in the Final, and Baltimore defeating Hamilton in 5 games as well, there was some debate on whether this constituted a successful season for the Pride. The pre-playoff articles that had debated the Pride’s merits as an elite team had pivoted to debating whether this team could be considered a success, if they were to lose to Baltimore. If you lose to the President’s Trophy winning team from the regular season, how is that a failure? They were, by definition, the best team in the league during the 66-game season leading up to the playoffs.
There was a lot of chatter leading into the series about how the Pride couldn’t win on the road, and a lot of people that believed that wholeheartedly, and the importance of that could be seen in the fact be seen in the game schedule. President’s Trophy win equaled home ice advantage for Baltimore and that meant that if San Francisco was going to win the Challenge Cup for the first time in franchise history and finally get that monkey off their back, they were going to have to find a way to win in Baltimore, against a team that was every bit as capable at home as the Pride.
Game 1 was, as expected, a tightly contested affair that saw both teams come out firing in the first period. Two goals for each team, including a late shorthanded goal by the Platoon’s Ekaterina Valieva, saw the teams come out even at 2-2 after the first. Perhaps the two teams settled in a bit after that frenetic start, as the second, while still seeing plenty of shots, had zero goals and the teams remained tied into the third. So far, the first game of the series had lived up to the expectations of the two top teams from the regular season.
For San Francisco, part of what helped them develop from a 31-win team in S74 and a 34-win team in S75 was the development of the “Kid Line,” that consisted of 3 of the top 5 draft picks from the S71 Draft: Levin Schattenaxt, Logan Webb, and Dominik Winters. They were, of course, far from the only playoff contributors and Mercedes Bayle, another top 5 pick from that same draft that San Francisco had acquired in a trade, was also a key contributor in the Pride’s playoff run to this point. It would be remiss to ignore Viktor Hargreeves, Oskar Scholz, Willow Soderberg-Snooks, Luke Laraque, and really the whole Pride team, but the “Kid Line” had developed into a lethal combination for Pride and took much of the pressure off Hargreeves and their line during the playoffs.
The Pride celebrate after scoring in Game 1 of the Challenge Cup Finals
Game 1 was no exception to that impact as 5 minutes into the third period, Winters would finish off a nice passing play from Webb and Schattenaxt to give the Pride a lead that they wouldn’t relinquish. With that win, the Pride answered arguably the biggest question that people had of them heading into the Final; turns out the Pride could win on the road in Baltimore. It wasn’t a perfect game from the Pride, but they were able to do what was necessary to win the game and get on the board in the Final.
Two days later, Game 2 saw Baltimore punch back hard. A 3-0 win that saw Beau Kavanagh stifle the Pride with 31 saves evening the series at 1-1. The Pride never really got going in the game, losing almost 60% of the faceoffs and giving up 2 powerplay goals on just three opportunities. If there was a reason for optimism for the Pride, it was that they came out of Baltimore with a split, stealing home ice advantage if they were able to hold serve at home as they had throughout the playoff, not losing a single game in San Francisco. They weren’t taking it for granted however, and it didn’t sit well with some on the team that they had now been shut out twice against their two most talented opponents that they had faced in this playoff (with no disrespect intended to Chicago or Winnipeg). This was a team that had scored 351 times in the regular season, the most in the league, and despite the reality that Baltimore had given up the fewest goals in the regular season (just 186), the Pride felt they could and should score against anyone.
It looked like their faith in themselves was going to be rewarded early in Game 3 as with the home crowd behind them, Dominik Winters would score just 27 seconds in, and the Pride would have a 3-0 lead after just 11 minutes of the first. The Platoon would show exactly why they were the best regular season team though, and a late goal in the first (again on the power play) would get them on the board. The second period would be all Baltimore as Valieva and Bellamy Blake (another talented young player from the S71 Draft with Schattenaxt, Bayle, Webb and Winters) would both score to bring things to a 3-3 tie heading into the third period. The first half of that period could be seen as an extension of much of the same, tightly played, evenly matched hockey. Willow Soderberg-Snooks would make it 4-3 Pride just before the 6-minute mark but M’Baku Olubori would equalize about 3 minutes later. Just a minute and a half later, the Pride would score what would become the decisive goal off the stick of Dominik Winters for his second game winner of the Final. Edzus Ozolins would score a 6th goal for San Francisco with about 3 minutes left, and the Pride would continue their dominance at home and take a 2-1 series lead.
Game 4 started rather similar to Game 3, with the Pride on the board just a minute into the game. Unlike Game 3, however, Baltimore would be on the board a minute later and would take the lead, 2-1, around the 10-minute mark of the period. Like the early Pride lead, the Platoon’s lead would only last a minute as well with Winters scoring to re-tie the game. At the end of the period, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, the Pride would score to make it 3-2 and a minute later, Baltimore would tie the game again. To summarize, it was 3-3 after one with both teams having the lead and losing it a minute later. In the second, it was the Platoon who would come out with the early goal, as Kezia MacKenzie would make it 4-3 for the Platoon. This time, they would hold the lead for half the period as they looked to even up the series and regain the home ice advantage. It wouldn’t be until Logan Webb slotted home a nice feed from Rowan O’Beirne before we were again tied. Just as in Game 3, this game was tied at 4. And like Game 3, San Francisco would score in the third to take the lead. This time, Toasty would score from the point to make it a 5-4 game. Baltimore wouldn’t go away however, as even though Winters would score to make it 6-4 with about 5 to play, they would again answer to cut the lead to 1 on a strong individual effort from Erik Bergmark. That would be as close as they would get however, as a late goal from Sydney Shaw would seal the 7-5 win to push the Platoon to the brink heading back to Baltimore down 3-1 in the series.
Baltimore fans had reasons to feel hopeful about Game 5 as they were far from the only ones that felt like the Platoon had a good shot to stay alive at home and force it back to San Francisco and a Game 6. As we’ve previously mentioned, each of the Pride’s losses in the playoffs (3 in the second round against the Los Angeles Panthers, 1 in the conference final against the Winnipeg Aurora, and in Game 2 of this series in Baltimore) had been on the road. Those questions hadn’t fully been answered despite the Pride winning Game 1 in Baltimore, but anyone would rather be in the Pride’s shoes than not at this point in the series.
For the first time this series and this season, the Challenge Cup was in the building for Game 5 in Baltimore. A sense of unease and nervousness hung over the building as the fans filed in, wondering if this would be the last time they would see their team this season. There was all the pomp and circumstance as well: a pre-game concert, rally towels on each seat, and appearances by various Platoon alumni as they tried to will their team to survive another day and eventually force a Game 7 back at home.
It was an impressively raucous crowd to start the game, something that was clearly expected as the Pride would get on the board on their very first shift. David Doug, the hero of Game 7 against the Los Angeles Panthers, would snap home a point shot after a nice possession play by Winters and Schattenaxt, and the Baltimore crowd had the life sucked out of them. That feeling would only grow when 10 minutes later, Winters would score off a feed from Sydney Shaw. A 2-0 lead for the Pride at the end of the first and outshooting the Platoon 17-9 had the crowd growing increasingly anxious during the intermission. 2 minutes into second period? Another goal for Dominik Winters and reality was starting to set in for the Platoon faithful. Yes, they had come back from deficits on multiple occasions both in the playoffs and this series, but something felt different in this game. At the halfway point of the period, a goal from Edzus Ozolins saw the Platoon faithful exit their seats and head home (despite the cost of finals tickets and that the Challenge Cup would be awarded assuming the Pride held onto their now 4-0 lead). By the start of the third, reality was setting in for both teams and the Keeper of the Cup who was now responsible for getting the Challenge Cup into true presentation beauty. A fifth goal for the Pride, this time from Luke Laraque, midway through the third offered a brief stoppage before the celebration was well and truly on.
For the first time in franchise history, Challenge Cup Champions
As the final buzzer went, the relief of generations worth of Pride fans was released into the world and the Pride’s players poured off the bench and mobbed their goaltender, Justin Time. Joy, exhilaration, pride, relief, all could be seen on the faces of Pride players. They would stop their reveling for long enough to show the proper respect to their defeated opponents, the traditional end of series handshake was not ignored and as the last Platoon player left the ice after saluting their home crowd, the SHL commissioner started the ceremony to bring the Challenge Cup onto the ice. Toasty, the Pride captain, was practically bouncing up and down (as much as one can in a pair of skates) as he skated to receive the Challenge Cup for the first time in San Francisco Pride history.
In that one pure moment when Toasty received and then lifted the Cup for the first time (both as a player and for the team), none of what had been previously written matters. None of the losses or questions or talking heads that simply didn’t like the team matter. The silence, which really wasn’t silence at all, was perfect.
Toasty becomes the first player to lift the Cup as a member of the Pride
To the surprise of no one, the Pride’s party lasted well into the night and into the days that followed before the championship parade. Toasty and Willow Soderberg-Snooks snuck off to get married at some point during that gap (fully intentionally, not in a fit of drunken revelry) and Viktor Hargreeves kidnapped the Cup for a day to take it and fill it with fancy foods. The team agreed that this did not count as his day with the Cup. Each player would eventually get one of those, and while most declined to say what they would be doing with the Cup on their day, Dominik Winters did agree to share his plan. He said that he was going to bring it back to Czechia and share the day with his dad, Alex Winters, who had won the Challenge Cup himself in his playing days with the Manhattan Rage, scoring the Cup-winning goal in the S52 Finals against, who else, the San Francisco Pride. The father had prevented the Pride from winning, and the son, the likely favorite to win playoff MVP, helped them finally get that first win. How about that for things coming full circle?
WC: 3,559
Alex Winters (retired)
Matej Winters (retired)
Dominik Winters S45 Jesster Trophy Winner Challenge Cup Winning Goal Club: S52
Wonderful article, great job winters! I still faintly recall playing for the Admirals in their inaugural season. Hard to believe it took this long, but I'm glad to lift the cup with you and the rest of the Pride!
39alaska39![[Image: LtYiiBY.png]](https://i.imgur.com/LtYiiBY.png)
![[Image: 3wWdYjP.png]](https://i.imgur.com/3wWdYjP.png)
![[Image: Qobal9Q.png]](https://i.imgur.com/Qobal9Q.png)
![[Image: kOIyakT.png]](https://i.imgur.com/kOIyakT.png)
![[Image: Caleb_H.gif]](https://sig.grumpybumpers.com/host/Caleb_H.gif)
![[Image: TROYMCCLURE.gif]](https://sig.grumpybumpers.com/host/TROYMCCLURE.gif)
![[Image: IAP8v68.png]](https://i.imgur.com/IAP8v68.png)
![[Image: Ak8rQKy.png?width=675&height=375]](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1086360707303489571/1097935215311200416/Ak8rQKy.png?width=675&height=375)
![[Image: image.png?width=600&height=300]](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/1086360707303489571/1109630983558402178/image.png?width=600&height=300)
