So, what were you up to in 1991? Me, I can’t be entirely sure, but it definitely involved some combination of gymnastics, slap bracelets, and watching Nickelodeon-produced PSAs about acid rain. If it helps trigger your memory: The Soviet Union was dissolving that year, Super Nintendo came to the U.S., and the ribbon was being cut on California’s first Starbucks. The Silence of the Lambs and “Losing My Religion” were released, and Emma Roberts and Mike Trout were born. And the Detroit Red Wings, one season removed from a pitiful fifth-place division finish, ended their year in the Norris’s third spot to qualify for the NHL playoffs.
That was 23 years ago, and Detroit hasn’t missed the postseason since.
Think about that: There are people, an entire generation of people, who have been born and have grown up and had their hearts broken by high school soul mates and gone off to college and graduated and are now tentatively finding their way through the world. And these people have never known what it’s like to see their favorite hockey team miss the playoffs.
The Red Wings’ 23 years constitutes the longest-running active playoff streak in any of the four major professional sports, and the fifth-longest in hockey history.1 Nine of 30 NHL teams, including the Predators, Lightning, and Senators, didn’t exist in their current iterations in that spring of 1991. The San Jose Sharks first dropped the puck on their franchise later that fall; the team is now second to Detroit in active consecutive NHL postseason appearances. (The Sharks would have to keep making it for another 13 years to even things up.) A couple of players on this year’s Red Wings roster hadn’t even been born then, and so of course it was one of them, 22-year-old Riley Sheahan, who scored the goal last week that guaranteed the streak would live on for at least one more year.
