Mark Spector

ANAHEIM, Calif. -

If your puck luck is such that your local NBC affiliate actually airs Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final on Wednesday, you’ll be regaled with tales of how many years the likes of Chris Pronger, Teemu Selanne and Todd Marchant have fruitlessly chased the hockey’s Holy Grail.

If the Anaheim Ducks close out the Ottawa Senators at the Honda Center however, there will be a much bigger thirst satisfied than just a few players whose careers will be satiated.

The National Hockey League first opened its doors in California upon its first major expansion in 1967, when the Los Angeles Kings and California Seals fired up out West. Forty years later, the Stanley Cup has never summered on the West coast, until perhaps after Wednesday night, when the Anaheim Ducks have a chance to bring Stanley to the freeways of SoCal.

It’s one of the many subplots that surrounds any Stanley Cup run, a two-month, 16-win odyssey that takes more blood, sweat and busted bones than any other North American title. So, with one game to go, it was awfully tough for the Ducks to avoid talking about it — just a little bit — despite pleas from their super-disciplined coach Randy Carlyle about “staying focussed” and “avoiding distraction.”

“Every player’s dream is to win the Stanley Cup,” Anaheim veteran Teemu Selanne said on Tuesday, his team one win away from a Cup he began chasing as a Winnipeg Jet back in 1992. He came to Anaheim in the early days of the franchise, when he and Paul Kariya were the NHL’s fastest tandem on likely its slowest ice.

Selanne left the Ducks, returned, and now, with his career fading, Selanne might finally be in the right place at the right time after all.

“If you can win at the place that is your happy place, it’s even more special,” he said. “This team, this franchise, has done so much hard work over the years. It’s a good time to get rewarded.”

In recent years the story of the ready-to-hang-’em-up veteran who finally wins a Cup has been well worn. There was Ray Bourque in Colorado, Dave Andreychuk in Tampa Bay, and Rod Brind’Amour in Carolina. If Anaheim claims the Cup however, the sense of accomplishment will spread far past the confines of the Ducks roster, to a California hockey dream that began 40 years ago.

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It will touch the late Jack Kent Cooke, the Canadian owner of the Washington Redskins who brought the Los Angeles Kings to California in 1967, but died on April 6, 1997. Charlie Finley, the Oakland A’s owner who bought the Seals, put them in white skates and renamed them the Golden Seals. That really helped — the Seals made the playoffs just twice and were a running NHL joke, until finally relocating in Cleveland.

There was Bruce McNall, a modern-day Finley himself, who bought the Kings from Dr. Jerry Buss, bought Wayne Gretzky, and perhaps came within the curve of Marty McSorley’s illegal stick blade of creating the original California Cup winner.

California gave us Rogie Vachon. The Forum Club, where Sherwoods met silicone. Goldie Hawn. Tony Robbins. The Triple Crown line. The Miracle on Manchester. Even the Los Angeles Sharks of the old World Hockey Association.

While traditional Canadian teams wore proper hockey uniforms with primary colors, teams down here were always bedecked in Oakland A’s gold and green, Kings gold and regal purple, or the egg plant and teal of an Anaheim club that was foolishly named after a kid’s movie.

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The Fab Forum has changed hands now, and every Sunday morning the Faithful Central Bible Church worships there. A lot of water had to pass under the Hockey in California bridge to get to Wednesday night, the first day in NHL history that a Stanley Cup could be awarded to a California team on California soil. We always knew it wouldn’t be the Seals. We just assumed the Kings would be the first.

As it turns out, the Ducks are in line, and they look awfully tough to beat this time around.

“This is a team that’s going to be good for many years,” warned goalie J.S. Giguere. “It’s well run. It well owned. It’s well coached.”

This Ducks team has been to the conference finals in three of the last four years, and lost a seven-game Cup final to New Jersey in ‘03. Now, with a lethal mix of young studs like Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Francois Beauchemin alongside veterans like Chris Pronger, Selanne and Todd Marchant — players whose careers are complete, except for one, final detail — this Ducks team, like Carolina last year, seems unlikely to be denied.