E-Mail This Article to a Friend Headlining underdogs, overdogs, and improbable champions BY CHRISTOPHER YOUNG

There are some headlines that you never expect to read in life. Among them:

CARROT TOP CLINCHES REPUBLICAN NOMINATION;

STEINBRENNER LAUGHS OFF YANKS’ LAST-PLACE FINISH;

SURGEON GENERAL ADVISES A SIX-PACK A DAY FOR BETTER HEALTH;

HARVARD REJECTS FURTHER ENDOWMENTS, SAYS IT HAS ENOUGH $$;

WORCESTER POLYTECH CAPTURES NCAA HOOPS TITLE;

PHOENIX’S YOUNG WINS PULITZER PRIZE.

And then there’s ones that you see, and you still can’t believe them. Things like, JIM CARREY WINS SECOND STRAIGHT BEST ACTOR GOLDEN GLOBE or PRESIDENT IMPEACHED FOR AFFAIR WITH INTERN or MARLINS WIN WORLD SERIES — AGAIN! or GAY MARRIAGE APPROVED or BILL MURRAY GETS OSCAR NOD. The latest stunner that landed on your welcome mat came on Tuesday: LIGHTNING WIN STANLEY CUP. What? The Tampa Bay Lightning? Stanley Cup? In the same sentence? How can this be? Seriously?

But there it was, in the proverbial black and white. The Lightning, a franchise that until this season had posted just two winning seasons in its illustrious 11-year history, hoisted the silver chalice while players from Detroit, New Jersey, Boston, Montreal, and other hockey hotbeds watched on the tube. And when we talk about those nine losing seasons, we aren’t swapping tales about near-misses and fourth tiebreakers; we are looking at some remarkably inept Tampa hockey teams. Starting in the inaugural season of 1992, the Bolts’ W-L records were as follows: 23-54, 30-43, 17-28, 38-32 (good for an eighth seed), 32-40, 17-55, 19-54, 19-47, 24-47, 27-40, and then last year’s 36-25 hint of a turnaround.

Three winning seasons in a dozen, and the Lightning have a Stanley Cup. For the sake of comparison, the Boston Bruins from the fall of 1972 to the spring of 1997 — 24 straight winning seasons — have not won a single Cup. Of course, if you want even more irregularity, look at the Minnesota Twins (1987, 1991) and the Marlins (1997, 2003): in less than a decade both those organizations won a pair of World Series, while the long-established Chicago Cubs continued merrily along on their 95-year title drought.

Occurrences like these drive veteran sports fans absolutely batty. It was bad enough in ’97, when the six-year-old Marlins club won it all over a Cleveland franchise that hadn’t tasted championship Champagne of any vintage for half a century. But then four years later, baseball aficionados saw the four-year-old Diamondbacks franchise win a world title — those greenhorns in the bleachers needed the baseball rules tucked into the stadium program just to know what an infield-fly rule was — followed by the Thunderstix-waving Angels faithful being rewarded with that organization’s first trophy. At least for Red Sox Nation, the hurt was salved by the fact that both Arizona and Anaheim took out the Pinstripers en route to their post-season glory. But still ...

One must wonder whether the sports gods are just having some fun or playing cruel tricks on the fans of long-established and -suffering teams. Does it make any sense that teams like Florida, Arizona, Anaheim, Minnesota, and Toronto celebrate the ultimate victory while die-hards in Baltimore, Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh have all waited 20-plus seasons? Basketball has seen a bit more sanity, as no team with fewer than 35 seasons of NBA membership has ever won the O’Brien Trophy, but football has watched three teams in the last five years (St. Louis, Baltimore, and there’s Tampa again) win a Super Bowl after existing for fewer than 30 seasons. Backers from Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Atlanta, and San Diego suffer in silence as they patiently wait for their first Lombardi trophy.

Hockey has joined the Johnny-come-lately crowd. Two years ago the Carolina Hurricanes (after just five seasons in Raleigh on the heels of 20 fruitless years in Hartford) reached the Cup Finals; last year it was the Disney-created Anaheim Mighty Ducks. Those two teams lost to better and longer-established teams, but that was not the case this season: the Lightning reigned supreme in seven games over the Cinderella Calgary Flames, who had knocked off a top, second, and third seed en route to the Finals. Yet even that runner-up squad had been an NHL entity in Calgary for a mere 24 seasons (though they were the graybeard franchise compared to the upstart Lightning).

And we won’t even go into the plights of the Minnesota North Stars and the Quebec Nordiques. Well, maybe we will. Neither of those organizations won a Stanley Cup in its original city, but once the North Stars moved to Dallas and the Nordiques to Denver, each won a Cup within five years. And in the Avalanche’s case, it was the year immediately following the Nordiques’ move west. Ouch.

Given the fact that the Lightning had been bad for so long, you would have thought that ultimately — through annual high draft picks — the franchise would begin to turn around. And eventually it did. And Tampa truly was a most deserving champion this season, as it finished atop the Eastern Conference with 106 points and displayed remarkable consistency and resiliency all season long. Yet it’s still difficult for veteran hockey observers to accept the fact that a team so long associated with futility can so rapidly reverse course and build a championship squad. And it’s doubly tough for long-standing fans in cities such as Cleveland or Boston to see the supporters of the Marlins or Lightning — both teams averaging around 11,000 fans per game as recently as two years ago — being rewarded so quickly. After all, those teams have certainly not even been in their respective leagues long enough to inflict the suffering and heartbreak to which the Tribe and Bruins have subjected their fans over the last few decades. Combine that disgust/jealousy with the vision of yahoo fans in the stands waving towels or hankies or clapping inflatable sticks and you’ve got widespread cursing to the heavens.

Indeed, to the average sports fan who truly appreciates a winning team and all that it represents to the sport and the community, seeing CANADIENS WIN CUP is almost preferable to MIGHTY DUCKS WIN CUP. And that’s why so many baseball purists in the fall of 2001 were faced with a perplexing Fall Classic dilemma: root for the Yankees, who had already won four of the previous five World Series yet represented a shattered city after 9/11, or back the fledgling D-Backs, who were in only their fourth season and represented a state full of retirees, desert dogs, and gophers (er, golfers)? A lot of people on the East Coast decided that they wouldn’t necessarily support the Diamondbacks, but wouldn’t exactly root against the Yankees, either. Nothing was really resolved when the Series ended, but it certainly became memorable when left-for-dead Arizona mounted an improbable bottom-of-the-ninth rally to win game seven over the previously impervious Mariano Rivera.

Of course, on some occasions it’s not such a bad thing when an underdog upstart carts away the hardware. Heading into the weekend, the LA Lakers — with at least four potential players as well as their coach likely bound for the Hall of Fame, LA is now viewed as the Yankees of the hoops world — have managed to fall into a 2-1 hole in the best-of-seven NBA Finals. The Lakers have established themselves as one of the most dominant yet perplexing teams of our era, and with Karl Malone and Gary Payton now on board a team that had already won three of the previous four NBA titles, they were eminently favored to trample through the playoff jungle and capture the franchise’s 15th overall championship. After all, the Western Conference teams have been so overwhelmingly superior to the Eastern squads since Michael Jordan retired that most felt that even the West’s fourth seed (Sacramento) could have knocked off the best the East had to offer in the Finals. Yet here are the Detroit Pistons, the last team from the East other than Chicago to win an NBA crown (and that was 14 years ago), standing up to the bullies from Tinseltown and not only taking the first game in LA, but on paper being the best team in all three games thus far. If not for a strategy breakdown in the final moments of game two — which was the centerpiece of the Lakers’ 16-2 run that ultimately carried them to an OT win — the Pistons might’ve been looking at a series sweep when the teams resume play in Motown on Sunday. Still, with the next two games in Detroit after the 20-point pounding inflicted on LA Thursday, and the Pistons already having proved that they can win on the Lakers’ home court, it would appear that the Lakers’ dynasty could be nearing its end.

And that wouldn’t set off too much boo-hooing in the world of pro basketball. The Lakers are a fickle and confounding bunch given their inherent talent, and even their own fans cannot comprehend how this team can alternately dominate a game and then withdraw into a collective lackadaisical shell. When they put their minds to playing hard, they are unbeatable, especially with Kobe Bryant and Shaq providing virtually automatic points every trip down the court. Malone and Payton were supposed to seal the Lakers’ infallibility this season, but their final hopes for a first ring before riding off into the sunset are dimming by the day — especially with the Mailman’s knee woes cropping up at the worst possible time.

The Tampa Bay Lightning were a likable team, and while their rapid success (on the heels of years of ineffectiveness) is a bit unnerving to the hard-core sports fan, that same fan can take solace in the concurrent misery of Shaq & Co.

For sometimes the identity of a championship team (and its vanquished foe) doesn’t always make sense, but it still feels right.

"Sporting Eye" runs Mondays and Fridays at BostonPhoenix.com. Christopher Young can be reached at cyoung[a]phx.com