There Was One Thing Left To Do…
Senior forward Kyler Krob holds the 2015 State Championship trophy on March 7 at the Alliant Energy Center. The championship marked the 13th championship won by Superior High School. Submitted Photo
By Kyler Krob
One of my dreams as a little kid was holding the state championship trophy in my hands as a Superior Spartan. The ending of this year’s hockey season finally fulfilled my childhood goal. It was a moment I will never forget in my lifetime, and I shared it with the boys I’ve always cared for.
Throughout my 14 years of playing hockey, I played alongside nine other boys that would become seniors alongside me.
I gained best friends through hockey that I will have for years to come, all because we were brought together by playing a game that we loved. This kind of friendship and camaraderie is what made the teams we played on better than most opponents.
Halfway through my senior season, things weren’t going as foreseen and we weren’t winning as often as we had hoped. People started doubting us, mentioning it to our faces that we weren’t as good as previous years. Still, we all had the confidence to prove everybody wrong.
Before we went out on the ice for one of the last games of the season, one of our assistant coaches, Evan Nelson, walked in front of the team and said something that lit a fire in us. He mentioned to us what we had already heard multiple times before, how people weren’t expecting us to make it that far.
He then stood there and looked at us and said, “Well, there’s only one thing left to do. We gotta win the whole ******ing thing.” Jake Taylor first said that line in the 1989 baseball movie “Major League” to inspire his team to victory, much like the way Coach Nelson did.
Taylor’s quote was perfect for us, as everyone knew that we didn’t have a great season, but we could still win the whole thing. It energized the team and got us focused for each opponent we had yet to face.
Before every game from then on, each of us remembered what we had to do, and how to do it. We started to thrive as a team and showed the chemistry we had gained through our years growing up together.
As we played our last postseason games, this quote was becoming more genuine. We won our sectional final against our rival, Hudson, and made our way past the first two nail-biting games in the state tournament.
The suspense leading up to the championship game was unreal. We were all thinking about our jobs and how we just had to finish off what we had started.
Winning the championship game 6-0 was one of the best moments of my life. Finally completing the goal I had as a child was unreal. I’ll never forget this season, the people I played alongside with and the crazy people that cheered us on.
So at the end of the season, we finished the only thing that was left to do: we won the whole thing.
