Nobody in St. Louis will ever forget the date. June 12, 2019. The day the St. Louis Blues finally brought home a Stanley Cup Championship.
Now, just 96 days later, the Blues have that magical season in their rear view mirror and are focused on a new goal. Repeating.
The Blues will play their first preseason game Monday night against Dallas, and while most of the guys who were on the ice as the final buzzer sounded in Game 7 in Boston in June won't be there, everyone has made it clear that it's time to focus on winning another one.
"We're ready to turn the page. We're ready to move on," Blues captain Alex Pietrangelo said at practice this past weekend. "Monday's the first game. We've felt like that already since guys started rolling into town so we've already kind of turned our head and looked forward."
There's no doubt, that magical June will live forever in St. Louis. But the hunger level for the the Blues players is like if they had never even won the Cup.
"You get a little taste of it and you want more. It's true," goalie Jordan Binnington said. "We're looking to keep building and keep coming together more as a team."
"I know you guys have a lot of questions about the Cup and all this stuff. Summer was nice but it's time to go back to work," forward Vladimir Tarasenko said. "If you keep living with past memories you don't have any success in the future."
The Blues say they've flipped the page to focus on 2019-2020, and they certainly have the right man at the helm to make sure that's the case. Craig Berube won't hear any excuses for not showing up ready to give a peak performance this season
"We've got to move on from last year and we've got work to do," Berube said after the first day of practice. "That's basically the message."
When the puck drops Monday night, a new chase will begin.
While fans might continue to celebrate the glorious summer that was, the team that made it happen is already focused on doing it all over again.
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