The Climb is what gives The Summit meaning. Just as getting dropped off at the top of a mountain by a helicopter doesn’t bring the same sense of accomplishment as putting crampons to ice and pick-axe to stone, winning that first championship as a rookie just isn’t quite the same as winning it as a veteran. Years of despair feed the delight. Years of pain fuel the pride. It’s John F. Kennedy’s “Not because it’s easy, but because it is hard.” It’s Jimmy Dugan’s “The hard is what makes it great.”
It’s the blood, the sweat, the bumps, the bruises, every blocked shot and every smear along the boards and every cross-check in the crease and every facewash and every practice drill and every late-night flight and every gut-punch loss and every out-of-thin-air win and every summer minute spent in the gym. It’s what gives a player that indefinable look of delirium and exhaustion and satisfaction, tears mingling with sweat in an unkempt beard as he lifts the Stanley Cup over his head.
It’s long, it’s difficult, it’s grueling and it’s agonizing. And the very real possibility that you’ll never actually reach that summit lingers in the back of your mind throughout, gnawing at your confidence and either fueling or draining your desire to endure. Every training camp comes with a deep breath and a “here we go again.”
That’s the climb. And the climb is the joy and the challenge and the thrill and the whole point of sports. The climb is everything.
Until you tumble all the way down the mountainside, look up, and realize you have to make it all over again.
For three glorious years, the Los Angeles Kings ruled the hockey world. Their remarkable run to the 2012 Stanley Cup as an eighth seed was followed by a trip to the Western Conference finals, then another championship in 2014. The Kings were everything you’d want in a champion — big, strong, mean and talented, with just the right touch of cockiness.
Nearly the entire team had homes in picturesque Manhattan Beach and lived the perfect life — feted but left alone, beloved but anonymous among the rich and famous of Southern California. Man, it was sweet.
“Those years were just amazing,” defenseman Drew Doughty said. “Everything about it — life, it was just great. And (now) you see the other side of it. When we had such a good team, you never expected us to get into this hole that we’re in now.”
Since Alec Martinez scored the series-winning goal in overtime for the second time in two weeks to give the Kings their second championship in 2014, the Kings have won exactly one playoff game, back in 2016. They missed the playoffs in 2015. Missed the playoffs in 2017. Missed the playoffs in 2019, 2020 and 2021. They didn’t qualify for the play-in round in the 2020 Edmonton bubble.
Doughty was just 23 when he lifted the Cup for the second time. The No. 2 pick in the 2008 draft had helped turn the franchise from afterthought to champion in three years. He never dreamed he’d be in the position he is now — 32 years old with nothing to show for it in between, still just trying to get a foothold at the base of the mountain.
At least the Kings are on the way up. Doughty knows this. Doughty’s excited by this. All those losing seasons have helped the Kings build a deep and exciting pool of young talent, and they’re currently sniffing around the periphery of the playoff picture at 16-12-5. But Doughty knows the life cycle of the NHL. He acknowledged at the beginning of the year that it still might be “a year or two before we can be, let’s say, Stanley Cup contenders.” And that was being optimistic, given how long the climb typically takes. Doughty knows he only has so much time left in the league. It’s not the dismissive media that fires him up, he said. It’s being a bottom-feeder in a league he once ruled.
And every lost season that passes is a lost opportunity to feel what he felt from 2012-14, to live that life again.