HERSHEY, PA — About a half hour after the Hershey Bears defeated the Lehigh Valley Phantoms 2-1 in Game 1 of the Atlantic Division semifinals, Dylan McIlrath walked into the media room to speak to reporters. The May 1 game at Giant Center was the Bears’ first of the postseason after an opening-round bye. They are attempting the difficult feat of repeating as champions.
McIlrath, the Bears’ captain and unquestioned leader on the ice, wore a grey athletic shirt featuring the team’s playoff logo paired with the Calder Cup. Above the mark, featured the type All In arching above the top of the championship trophy.
Could this be the team’s new custom playoff shirt for this year?
“Yeah,” McIlrath said. “So, obviously, ‘All In.’ It’s a great expression. We’re going to need all our guys to be all in if we want to make another run at a Calder Cup.
“I’ll show you the back.”
My interest was piqued.
“We’ve got some playing cards,” McIlrath explained. “And the playing cards just came from on our bus. A lot of long road trips, so we got basically over half the team playing cards. It’s been our identity on the bus. We’ve got guys bonding over that and then we just had a little play on words, being determined to win this Cup.”
The Ace reads Attitude, the King says Killer Instinct, the Queen has No Quit, and the Jack implores to Do Your Job.
I did some more intrepid reporting and digging days later.
“Our leadership group got together with our coaches and put [the shirts] together,” Matt Strome said to RMNB after Game 2. “They’re pretty sweet. We play cards on the bus, so we went with the card theme. We have the Ace, Queen, King, and Jack on the back with a bunch of different slogans.”
Yes, Stromer, but I need details. The good stuff.
“Did a little team get-together and decided on the cards thing,” Ethen Frank said. “We play a lot of cards on the bus and so that’s kind of where that came from. The ‘All In’ thing is just buying in every day, every shift, whether it’s an off day or doing stuff at home. Whatever you can do to make yourself ready to go for playoffs with the days between games is big and I think everybody is doing a great job.”
Some nice nuance there on All In from The Fastest Man in Hockey. But, still, I felt like I was missing something. I continued to ask around and was eventually pointed to center Jimmy Huntington, a six-year AHL veteran out of Laval, Quebec, playing in his first season with the Bears. I was told he was the ringleader of sorts.
“We have two tables on the bus and we just play cards like the whole trip on the road even if we go to Lehigh and it’s an hour and a half away,” an eager-to-speak Huntington said, getting to the juicy stuff. “We play a game called Seven Up. We just play that game. You go up seven, you go back to one, you go back up to seven. We’re like 10 people playing that game so that’s why we have this on the back of our shirt. We put some good slogans on it.”
I read them aloud back to him. “There we go!” Huntington said excitedly.
So which 10 players?
“Me, (Pierrick) Dubé, (Hendrix) Lapierre, Vinny Iorio, Hardy (Häman Aktell), that’s pretty much our table here,” Huntington said. “We have Priskie and Limoges, that’s our table and then in the back, it’s just like the old guys playing baccarat and all those guys. That’s our table though. We always play together, like we know how guys play, the way they play.”
The playing card game, Seven Up, is an American variant of All Fours, which typically includes two to four players but can include larger groups.
Each round starts with a dealer. This dealer deals each player seven cards in a row then puts the remaning cards in a face down pile in center of players. Then players take cards from the pile and flip them to get an ace to seven of any suit. Then they put them in order (Ace is one, seven is seven) the first player to flip up all cards wins.
Huntington said that the Bears’ card games can sometimes get cutthroat — and because of that — funny. Well, at least with hindsight.
“Sometimes someone chop over you,” Huntington said. “We always, like every turn, you have a different suit who is like dominant that turn so sometimes people hope that you’re going to get that hand, and people like Dubé or Vinny Iorio love to chop, screw me over. I get mad, they get mad. That’s how it goes, we always competitive, same thing on the ice.”
Just like the crossword puzzles that defined the Bears’ team last year, the card games have brought Hershey players closer together in a historic year where they were the winningest team in franchise history. The shirts remind the guys of all the miles they’ve logged on the road this season — unglamorously, on a bus — to reach this point. Hershey’s longest trips can approach double-digit hours — such as their ride to Charlotte, North Carolina in March that Evgeny Kuznetsov joined them on before being traded.
“Just coming here, I had no expectations to be honest with you,” Huntington, who reached the Western Conference Finals last season with the Milwaukee Admirals, said. “I just came in and put my head down to help the team to win. We had a great season, we almost got the big (AHL all-time winning percentage) record up there, but now it’s just a brand new season. We stick together out there and we play for each other.”
