Jan. 7 is a significant date in St. Louis Blues lore. It’s the day Jordan Binnington made his first start in 2019. It’s also the day everything changed for a team that was last in the NHL just a few days prior. But there’s another date that is on the same level – Jan. 6, the night before. It’s the date a few Blues were hanging in a bar in Philadelphia watching the NFC wild-card game and Gloria came into their lives.
“They had a DJ in the bar and whenever there was a commercial break, they would crank the tunes and all these guys from Philly would get up and start dancing around,” Joel Edmundson told stlouisblues.com’s Chris Pinkert in February. “They played this song ‘Gloria’ a couple of times, and this one guy looked at the DJ and said, ‘Keep playing “Gloria”!’ so they kept playing it.
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“Everyone would get up and start singing and dancing. We just sat back and watched it happen. Right there we decided we should play the song after our wins. We won the next game, we got a shutout, so we just kept on playing it.”
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They’ve been playing it now after 29 regular-season wins and eight more in the playoffs – with more, they hope, coming as they head into the Western Conference finals.
The 1982 song is also sweeping St. Louis. “Gloria” is now played in the arena following wins and can be found on T-shirts signs and radio stations. One St. Louis station, KYKY-FM, played it for 24 hours after the team won Game 7 of its second-round series over the Dallas Stars.
Laura Branigan’s Grammy-nominated song spent 36 weeks on the charts. If you go 36 weeks from Jan. 7, that leads right up to the start of what is usually training camp – when you usually begin to look at who the next Stanley Cup champion will be. Not a bad coincidence for a team that hopes to be singing it for the rest of the playoffs.