With Expendables Like These...

One of the most remarkable success stories of the season, in sports and elsewhere, is the octane-fire rise of the ice hockey team, the Vegas Golden Knights. Only in its inaugural season in the highly competitive sport, it has unbelievably reached the finals of the Stanley Cup, ice hockey's equivalent of the Super Bowl. Some say they are on the verge of making history: they are not, they have already made history, the first expansion team in fifty years to make the finals playing in their first season. The team is made up of players practically rejected by their former clubs, expendables in the sport parlance. These castoffs, throwaways, can still be acquired, bought in an Expansion Draft, a particularly distressing flea market peculiar to the sport. It was for no reason they were dubbed the Golden Misfits. But if you think hope had sunk as far as it  could go, consider the obliterating news that the head coach was fired by the Florida Panthers in the 2016/2017 season: a club that, while not taking anything away from their history and performances, cannot by any stretch of imagination considered one of the illustrious names of American ice hockey. The dismissal took place during an away game and coach GG, Gerald Gallant, was rumored to have been denied even a seat on the team bus and had to pay his own cab fare to the airport. If the largest group of outcasts, rejects, write-offs ever assembled in a place, the Vegas Golden Knights was one. Lots of folks joked it must have taken an audacious nerve of naming to have attached  the adjectives of golden and knights to the club. Few, very few expected them to lift their own hockey sticks, let alone a sword and now they roam in a territory where the big boys of the game such as the Detroit Red Wings, the Chicago Blackhawks and the marvelously-named Pittsburgh Penguins used to call the shots.
The odds staked against them reaching thus far was enormous, dispiriting, in all aspects similar to the chances given Leicester Football Club of England to win the 2015/2016 Premier League. Here was a club that escaped relegation by the whiskers the previous season. Leicester went on to win the league, a feat the whole world had said would only be achieved in the realm of dreams. Like Leicester, the Vegas Golden Knights have shown us that the dividing line between dream and reality could be very thin, very nebulous indeed. Their belief has won, the unflagging determination to rise from the abyss of despair to dizzying heights of glory and illumination. Their story would have been a fable indeed if reaching the Stanley Cup final was their sole achievement but we have added goodies in the fact that the Vegas Golden Knights have done good in other aspects, It is the only major sports club, American Football and all, that has Las Vegas as its home and gives the city a huge sense of togetherness, camaraderie, if not unity. The first match they played was only five days after a gunman killed fifty eight concertgoers in  Las Vegas in October 2016. The Golden Knights won the match and provided some upliftment for the grieving city.
So the stones the builder rejected have become the centerpiece of solidity and over-achievement, golden stones so to say. These expendables are not expendable, not on your life and they have shown us that being given the tag of failure, fiasco does not in any way equal the tag of damnation.