Party Hard

I've heard it said that "to the victor go the spoils." Rarely has that been more true than during the Pittsburgh Penguins' Stanley Cup Championship parade last week.

If you're not a hockey fan, or just live outside of the 412 and weren't privy to the extended coverage that local media gave the event, then you probably don't understand just how much celebrating this team did. Most of them, especially the younger guys like Jake Guentzel (22-years-old) and Connor Sheary (25-years-old) spent a few hours of a steamy, 80+ degree Southwestern PA day pounding beers on the back of pickup trucks that crawled along the parade route. Their resulting dehydration levels were a thing of beauty.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Sean Gentille did a masterful job the next day of documenting the highlights of the day.

A year after he was caught on camera with a fistful of aluminum Bud Light bottles crammed into his face, Dumoulin had another solid beer-related moment. He bit a can that someone tossed him along the route — Bud Light again — and shotgunned it in the middle of the street.

The best performance was, by far, defenseman Olli Maatta. The pictures and clips cataloging Maatta's day in Gentille's piece are each more spectacular than the one that came before it. And the photo of him being held up on his feet on back of the truck, wearing shades and a sloppy childlike grin that make him look like Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club [right], is destined to be a new avi or poster or something that I can keep in my life forever.

Though the parade passed less than a block away from my office building, I was feeling under the weather and declined to go out and watch firsthand. Instead, I watched on the 65in flat screen tv in our boardroom. Now I regret that decision. If, FSM willing, the Pens get the threepeat next year, I'm calling off from work, buying a case, and splitting it with the team as they pass by.