ChildOfDust

While I have an obvious bias in the result of the finals going in San Francisco's favor, it would be hard to argue that the Baltimore Platoon is not the team for which this Challenge Cup final holds the most significance. Their core is mostly comprised of players that were drafted in the mid-to-late 60s, with some early 70s players filling up the rest of their lineup's depth - which means that for some of their players, this is as good a chance as they will get for the rest of their careers (I'm mostly thinking of Max Manning and Videl Valor when I say this.) Whereas when you look at San Francisco's line-up, their core is mostly filled with players that have yet to start fighting the inevitable cruelty of time known as "regression" - apart from some pieces they have traded for in the past off-season, like Justin Time or Luke Laraque, who are the elders of the team as S64 and S65, respectively. The point being, while Baltimore has no guarantee they will come back to the final dance, and thus want this Cup to solidify the legacy of its current core, we could be seeing the start of a strong run of form for the northern Californian team, which means that while they are hungry for their first franchise Challenge Cup, it's not the end of the world if they don't win it all this season.

(247 words)

Levin has been living on Cloud Nine ever since his team, the San Francisco Pride, claimed the Challenge Cup in five games against the Baltimore Platoon last Saturday. While the number of games might tell the story of an expeditive series, the show on the ice was a wild, back-and-forth affair full of lead changes, solid goaltending performances and offensive prowesses from both teams. Ultimately, Baltimore's demise laid in the fact that they could only really stiffle San Francisco's high octane offense for the first two games of the series, losing by a 3-2 score in the first one, and recording a shutout in the second. But when a team's first line combines for 88 points in 21 playoff games, and that same team's second line produces 99 points in that time span as well... You can't hold those kinds of cannons quiet for long. I will leave you with one final thought : Dominik Winters deserves the Anton Razov trophy for Playoff MVP, and nothing that can be said will convince me otherwise. All three of us on that line (Winters, Webb and Schattenaxt) were brought into the team at the same time, and we've been glued to the hip since our call-up, so I can safely say that I would want nothing more than for him to bring individual hardware to our locker room for the next training camp.

(240 words)