Greenberg: Once upon a time in Chicago, Kane and Toews meant championships and parades

Patrick Kane is gone, headed to New York City, and this should feel like a bigger deal.

I’m not talking about a bigger deal for the diehard, living-and-dying-with-each-shift Blackhawks fans. I’m sure they’re morose but understanding of why it happened.

I’m talking about the average Chicago sports fan who dah-dah-dah-dahed for every big Blackhawks moment from 2008 through 2015. The fans who once thought the blue line was just the best way to get to O’Hare.

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Kane was, as Mark Lazerus wrote, likely the best Blackhawk of all time. Stan Mikita and Bobby Hull have the mythos of the Technicolor era, but Kane has three Stanley Cups. In the context of his era in Chicago, we had mesmerizing, likable athletes like Devin Hester, Derrick Rose, Javy Báez, among others, but no one was more exciting when it mattered in the postseason than Kane.

So yeah, Kane getting traded to the New York Rangers at the end of a long contract should be “cancel your plans” kind of news, even if we’ve known he’s getting traded all season. But the Bears have the No. 1 pick, the NFL combine is going on, the Cubs and White Sox are at spring training and, well, this isn’t 2013 anymore.

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GO DEEPER

Inside the Patrick Kane trade: How it went down and why the Blackhawks got so little in return

Time and reality had set in long ago. It wasn’t even the tedium of the “Kane hasn’t made a decision” non-updates we got on Twitter every few days, but rather the feeling that Kane and Jonathan Toews were like two guys who stuck around their hometown or their college town too long. Two guys lingering in the moments of their youth.

The Hawks are not only rebuilding, but they’re coming off a major scandal and they had already lost a good deal of their cultural relevancy in Chicago because they weren’t winning Stanley Cups any longer.

Still, with Kane now an ex-Blackhawks star and Toews, still on the roster, but out indefinitely with long COVID-19, there is a bit of sports sadness in the air.

Their glory days were something special, weren’t they?

Outside of the Michael Jordan Bulls and the Bears of the 1940s, no Chicago team sustained a championship level like the Blackhawks did through a seven-year stretch. “Kane and Toews” were shorthand for greatness.

Patrick Kane (left) and Jonathan Toews acknowledge the crowd during the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup championship rally at Soldier Field in 2015. (Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)

What they represented was not only a revival in popularity for hockey in Chicago, which had been dormant since Jeremy Roenick and Chris Chelios, but also an ante-upping of expectations for all of Chicago sports teams.

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How could the Blackhawks, even with the penurious salary cap of the NHL, pull off a run of sustained success (to borrow Theo Epstein’s favorite phrase) while the rest of Chicago’s teams could not?

The Cubs followed in their footsteps. The Hawks’ last Stanley Cup visit to Wrigley, less drunken than the first, came in 2015 when the Cubs were building their own potential dynasty. That didn’t come to fruition, further showing how difficult it is to win multiple championships.

Multiple championships.

That’s what every GM or president or owner promises, right?

Almost none deliver.

Mistakes were made, of course, some of which hastened the end of that long contention cycle. And of course, some were made at the beginning of the run, horrific mistakes of failed leadership that have since cast a pall over the whole era.

The Blackhawks have been just a perpetual bummer for years now. And now “Showtime” is officially over.

I think back to the 2009 and 2010 seasons, when this was all so new and exciting, when Kane and Toews were kids on skates and the entire city was falling in love. Because of the late Bill Wirtz’s inexplicable decisions to make his family’s legacy business as irrelevant as possible, when the Blackhawks were suddenly exciting, and available to watch on television. For the uninitiated fans, the ones who couldn’t tell you what the old Chicago Stadium smelled like, it was almost like an expansion team had to come to town. For others, it brought back memories of the 1990s when Roenick and Chelios were almost as famous in Chicago as the Bulls. For the older fans, it harkened back to the long-gone days of Tony Esposito, Mikita and Hull. The old guys were hired as ambassadors. We all experienced this revelation together.

At the time, a friend of mine, who lived in Chicago and grew up as a Penguins fan in the 1990s, as did I, remarked all these new Blackhawks fans reminded him of how Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr led a hockey revival in Pittsburgh.

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For years, you couldn’t find a Hawks game on TV at a bar, especially, of course, the home ones. And then, thanks to their popularity, and a little strong-armed marketing from Wirtz and former president John McDonough, bars were practically forced to put every TV on the Hawks — with the sound way up.

The average casual fan couldn’t tell you why Toews was one of the best two-way players in the NHL. They understood the concept of defense in a Bears town, but couldn’t elucidate why Brent Seabrook and Duncan Keith were so special. But you didn’t need a Ph.D. in pucks to understand why Kane was so awesome. You just had to watch him.

While my colleagues Lazerus and Scott Powers have put in the time to put Kane’s career, and this trade, in the proper context, they weren’t in Philadelphia that summer night in 2010. To quote the late, great Les Grobstein, a Hawks aficionado if there ever was one, I was there, one of the few who stuck around the pressbox to watch overtime because I wasn’t on a print deadline. I saw, or really didn’t see, Kane’s shot fly past Flyers goalie Michael Leighton. I saw, this time for sure, what everyone else saw happen next: Kane skating toward his team and throwing his gloves in the air. A moment of pure sports joy. I went downstairs and walked onto an NHL rink for the first time and covered a Cup celebration, the first of a trilogy.

Patrick Kane watches his winning goal go past Flyers goalie Michael Leighton as the Blackhawks won 4-3 in Game 6 to capture the 2010 NHL Stanley Cup. (Len Redkoles / NHLI via Getty Images)

That was a long time ago and, frankly, it feels like it. My hair was dark and my son was a few months from being born. I’m old and gray and my son is almost a teenager. Kane is 34 and still good enough to be desired by a Cup contender. Most of his teammates from the era are retired. Toews will be the next to hang up his skates. Hopefully, he’s healthy enough to give them some more use first.

But it’s not too soon to say goodbye to both of them. They fulfilled those long contracts and all of that promise. Their time has passed. Yes, it feels undignified that Kane was traded for a couple of draft picks on a Tuesday in February, but that’s how it works sometimes. Not everyone gets to retire with a statue like Paul Konerko.

I don’t know if the Wirtz family will ever erect statues of Kane and Toews, like the Hull and Mikita ones outside of the United Center, but it’s not like anyone will ever forget watching Kane play. In fact, his legend will only grow over the years as the team tries, and most likely fails, to recapture the fleeting glory of that time.

Kane and Toews.

For so long, that’s all you needed to say.

(Photo of Patrick Kane playing to the crowd during the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup victory rally at Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue on June 11, 2010: Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

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