Blackout In Boston
1988 Stanley Cup Final, Game 4, May 24, 1988.
Edmonton 3, Boston 3
(Game Aborted Due To Power Failure)

The 1987-88 Edmonton Oilers was a juggernaut team.  Entering the 1988 Cup final, the team had only lost two games in its previous three playoff series.  Their final opponent for the Stanley Cup was the Wales Conference Champion Boston Bruins—a good team, but not in comparison to Edmonton.

Continuing their domination in the playoffs, the Oilers pressed in the final series. The Oilers won the first three games handily by a composite score of 12-6. Wayne Gretzky was simply unstoppable. The Great One would go on to register 13 points in the final series alone, and would win the second Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player of the playoffs for the second and final time of his career.

With Game 4 slated for Boston Garden, it looked like the Oilers would get the chance to celebrate a Cup win away from home. However, with the score tied 3-3 in the second period, the players, coaches, officials and standing-room-only crowd were plunged into darkness. The rickety wiring and breakers at the old Garden had finally failed, and everyone was in the dark. After a short delay, NHL president John Ziegler announced that he was canceling the game and would invoke an old never-before-used rule to have game four played in Edmonton.

It was the first time since 1919—when the final between the Montréal Canadiens and Seattle Metropolitans was called due to the Influenza epidemic—that a Cup game had to be scrubbed.

Normand Lacombe, a seven-year NHL veteran who played in his only Stanley Cup final with the Oilers that season, remembers being shepherded with the rest of his teammates into the tiny visitors’ dressing room at the Garden.

"It was very weird," recalled Lacombe. "I was sitting on the bench at the time. Here we were, in the middle of a Stanley Cup final, and the lights go out. It was eerie. Right away, I began worrying about my parents. They had come to Boston to hopefully watch us win the Stanley Cup. They were in the stands, sitting in the dark."

"We had to go back to the dressing rooms where there were some emergency lights. They didn’t make us wait too long, though. It didn’t take long to find out the game was cancelled."

When the series returned to Edmonton, the Oilers beat the Bruins by a 6-3 count, winning their fourth Cup on home ice. The Oilers had done the improbable—they had completed a four-game "sweep" over the course of five games.

As Gretzky collected the Stanley Cup and the Conn Smythe Trophy, little did he, his teammates or the fans know that his time in Edmonton would end. Within months, he would be a Los Angeles King. Carrying the Cup for the fourth time would be Gretzky’s last function in an Oilers’ uniform.

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