The Bay Area team desperate for a title: It’s not the Warriors

There’s a Bay Area team striving for a title right now in a game that doesn’t involve a basketball.

It’s that other team in a Western Conference finals, the San Jose Sharks. The game they play is ice hockey and they are playing it in the South Bay, where temperatures were in the upper 80s earlier this week. It’s a wonderful game, say the Sharks — three dozen mostly bearded gents from the frozen north who resemble General Longstreet at Gettysburg, absent a few teeth.

Sharks fans, who deny having an inferiority complex despite finding themselves in the basketball-enthused Bay Area, love their game so much that they are readying themselves for what has happened every other time the Sharks have dared get this far in the NHL playoffs.

“I’m prepared for defeat, oh my goodness, yes,” said Mimi Vonmelchert, a Sharks season-ticket holder for the past 17 years who has had her heart broken like many others in 17-year relationships. “We’ve been here before.”

In the world of Sharks hockey, the fellows in the rakish teal jerserys never make it to the big dance. This week they’re close, once again. If they get past the St. Louis Blues, they will reach the Stanley Cup Finals, a place they have never been in their 25-year history.

If.

0-for-17

Seventeen times the Sharks have previously made it to the Stanley Cup playoffs. Seventeen times they have gone belly up. They have lost to the Maple Leafs and the Stars. They have lost to the Red Wings and the Blues. They have lost to outfits with names that don’t even sound like hockey teams — the Oilers, the Ducks, the Flames and the Avalanche.

“Maybe this year, they won’t break my heart,” said Vonmelchert, sitting in a San Jose hockey bar (they exist) Thursday night and getting ready to cry, if necessary, even though the Sharks were winning the third game of their series to go up on the Blues, two games to one.

Sharks fans suffer. As for the rest of the world, it tolerates hockey, if there’s nothing else on TV. The most recent football championship (the 2016 Super Bowl) got a 49.0 rating. The most recent basketball championship series (the 2015 NBA Finals) averaged a 13.9 rating. The most recent baseball championship (the 2015 World Series) averaged a 10.1 rating.

And — tucked away in the deep freeze of TV land — the most recent ice hockey championship (the 2015 Stanley Cup Finals) averaged a 3.2 rating.

None of this matters to the believers, however, and there are a lot of believers in the unlikely hockey mecca of San Jose. Even if they’re less than true believers.

“We’ve been here time and time again,” said Armando Juarez of San Jose, tugging on a beer at Stanley’s Sports Bar. “This is what’s expected. Round 3. We know what’s going to happen.”

Stanley’s is located in the unlikeliest spot of all — overlooking no fewer than four ice rinks. It’s the bar at Sharks Ice, the largest skating complex west of the Mississippi, a frozen alcazar located a mile southeast of downtown San Jose.

Usually it’s jammed with hundreds of Shark wannabes, figure-skating pixies and rail-grabbing, ankle-wobbling skating newbies. The Sharks themselves even practice at Sharks Ice, and they were there Thursday, before heading down the street to the Shark Tank to knock off the Blues. Their Instagramming swains were there too, to watch the practice session for free. But it was a modest crowd, if a crowd it was.

Dan Anglikowski, the manager of Stanley’s, said business wasn’t so hopping that he could drop the $3-off special on beer and pizza for the playoff game. And indeed even with the deal, the bar was but half full as the Sharks telecast was shown on a dozen flat screens.

Stanley’s was a reasonably priced alternative to the $200 or so a ticket to the actual game was selling for on StubHub. But a seat at a Sharks playoff game is still a lot cheaper than the $700 being asked for a comparable seat at the Golden State Warriors’ next home playoff game Thursday.

Some say hockey would be more likely to catch on — in the flesh and on television — if the puck didn’t move about the ice like a crazed hummingbird, impossible for the layperson to follow, or if the scoring of a goal did not resemble the elbow-flailing actions of a crowd trying to board a Pittsburg-bound BART train at rush hour.

Fun for the young

But such is the essence of hockey, said to be the world’s fastest game. And despite the well-publicized closing of the beloved Belmont ice rink last month, skaters still flock to such palaces as the rink at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco — the only one in town when the pop-up holiday rinks are hibernating. It’s the kind of place where the vending machines are stocked with $11 strawberry-flavored mouth guards for hockey players

“We could use more ice rinks,” said Paige Scott, manager of the Yerba Buena rink. “I’d like to build another one. We could use another knee whacking, too.”

Scott was referring to the high-water-mark in the ice world, the deliberate clubbing of Olympic ice skater Nancy Kerrigan by a rival’s ex-husband in 1994. It got skaters around the world pumped up. Nonskaters remember that day more clearly than they remember the name of last year’s Stanley Cup winners.

On Thursday morning, patrons at the San Francisco rink included a fifth-grade class from Hillcrest Elementary School, on a pregraduation field trip. Two dozen beginners grabbed the red rail and maneuvered hand-over-hand down the edge of the rink. Few said they knew what the Stanley Cup was.

“My students don’t do a lot of ice skating,” said teacher Julie Wisefield. “I’m just trying to expose them to something they don’t usually experience.”

The Sharks, who have not experienced a Stanley Cup either, play their next game on Saturday in San Jose. The puck drops and hopes rise at 4:15 p.m.