From the Blues to Aliu, Cherry, Babcock and the CWHL — it was a hockey year like no other

When 2019 began, few would have predicted the St. Louis Blues would be the Stanley Cup champions.

Or that Don Cherry would be gone from Coach’s Corner. Or that Mike Babcock would be relieved of his duties as head coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Or that women’s hockey would experience a meteoric rise and a dreadful fall in the span of a couple of months.

But it was the Blues, dead last in the NHL on Jan. 3, who showed us anything could happen this year.

It took some faith.

“I thought we had high-character players that could play,” Blues general manager Doug Armstrong told the Star. “When they found their footing in December — we were playing good hockey, but not winning games — and then when we started putting it together with the wins, it solidified that we were on the right track.

“What the guys did from January through June was spectacular.”

It also took some good luck. Goalie Jordan Binnington, who had been their fifth-string goalie, got a chance and got hot when it mattered. Asked if he was nervous, his cocky response: “Do I look nervous?” When told that he didn’t, Binnington retorted: “There’s your answer.”

It took a little magic. Fresh off a night in a bar in Philadelphia, the team decided on “Gloria” as their victory song. “We won the next game, we got a shutout, so we just kept on playing it,” said defenceman Joel Edmundson.

And it took a healthy dose of reality from a young girl named Laila Anderson, an inspiration in her own right as she waited for a bone-marrow transplant donor while leading the cheers for the Blues.

“Laila was a great influence on our players,” Armstrong said. “When you’re going through something like the playoffs, you’re so focused on yourself. And then you see what effect real life is having on other people, it puts everything in perspective. And to share with Laila when the season ended, and the parade, it’s been a great reminder of what’s really important.”

Laila, suffering from a rare immune disease, eventually got her transplant.

In a year when the Blues proved that anything can happen, a lot did.

The Tampa Bay Lightning, runaway winners of the Presidents’ Trophy, were swept in the first round of the playoffs by the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Beyond the NHL, the ground shook underneath women’s hockey. It all looked so positive in January, when the NHL invited four women to participate in the all-star skills competition. Kendall Coyne Schofield — blond ponytail flying — held her own with NHLers in the fastest skater event. She didn’t win, but she beat Clayton Keller of the Arizona Coyotes.

“My first impression was like, I can do this,” Coyne Schofield told NHL.com. “My speed is definitely my strength. Obviously, I was a little nervous, but I knew it was a moment that was going to break a lot of barriers and a moment that would change the perception of our game and show support to our game.”

Then something even more unthinkable happened. For the first time, the Canadian women’s team did not play the United States for gold at the world championship. The Canadians lost to Finland in the semis.

That quickly became a footnote after the shocking news that, after 12 seasons, the Canadian Women’s Hockey League would fold on May 1. The model was unsustainable, they said.

In a show of solidarity, and a bid to form one North American league for all of the game’s best, more than 200 top players worldwide boycotted the U.S.-based National Women’s Hockey League, now in its fifth season. They are still looking for a league of their own: barnstorming rinks across North America, attracting sponsors, raising awareness.

Tremors continue to rock the sport.

Babcock’s firing by the Maple Leafs, unthinkable on its own a year ago, set off a maelstrom of events. The revelation that he played a mind game with Mitch Marner in the winger’s rookie year — urging Marner to privately rank his teammates by work ethic, then revealing the list — was something of a tipping point in coach-player relations.

Using social media as their voice, the likes of Mike Commodore, Michal Jordan, Daniel Carcillo, Sheldon Kennedy and Akim Aliu revealed stories of racism and other abuse. Some of them led to more firings, coach Bill Peters in Calgary in particular.

And some of those stories were told on “Hockey Night in Canada” during the first intermission slot where Cherry had held forth for more than 30 years before his firing on Remembrance Day. His xenophobic “You people” rant regarding immigrants and poppies crossed the line for Sportsnet.

More change is coming, and 2020 promises to be an interesting ride. As NHL commissioner Gary Bettman put it in announcing how the NHL plans to address racism and unsafe work environments while pursuing inclusivity and diversity: “The world is changing for the better.”