Dave Hyde: Can we run 2023’s sports year back again in 2024? Please?
The end of any year is accompanied by a mix of emotions, but for anyone involved with South Florida sports — cheering, paying, playing or writing — one overriding “Auld Lang Syne” sentiment resonates about 2023 right to the finish line:
Don’t go.
Please, 2023, stay another year.
This new year isn’t even here and the old year already is missed. It was everything you didn’t even dare dream about in a sports year — only more so.
These 12 Gregorian months didn’t just deliver one team that reminded you why you fell in love with sports. It delivered almost every team. And most came with a backstory of decades of such futility that you could appreciate their sudden success even more.
The University of Miami and Florida Atlantic University men’s basketball teams? Neither had been to a Final Four, and together they suddenly composed half of it.
The Florida Panthers and Miami Heat? The lowest playoff seeds in their respective sports won in tantalizing lockstep through the spring all the way to championship series.
The Miami Marlins? The franchise that does nothing right did everything right in making the playoffs.
Inter Miami? They got scant attention until signing the biggest free agent in the history of American sports. Lionel Messi could’ve just showed up and South Florida won. But he began winning games from his direct kick for the winner in his opener to the League Cup.
The Miami Dolphins? The team that had made the playoffs twice in two decades made the playoffs twice in 2023 — once last January for the previous season and then last Sunday clinched a spot for this season. How’s that for a two-for-one of fun?
Even a lower-profile team like the Nova Southeastern men’s basketball team showed how overflowing our overlapping winning was by taking the Division II national title in a 36-0 season. And the Miami women’s basketball team made the Elite Eight.
Delray Beach’s Coco Gauff won the U.S. Open, her first major tennis tournament, at age 19.
West Palm Beach native Brooks Koepka won his fifth golf major, the PGA Championship, and took the trophy to Panthers and Heat playoff games.
Add it all up, and 2023 was a never-ending never-never land of sports. Never had our four professional teams made the playoffs together. Never had two made a championship series in the same year — much less at the same time on an alternating-night basis that left everyone over-stimulated and sleep deprived.
Never, too, did anyone better define what a sports can deliver than Panthers coach Paul Maurice in the minutes after losing the Stanley Cup Final to Vegas.
“What it’s like,’’ he said.
He’s coached for four decades, ranks sixth among wins for NHL coaches and had an epiphany during this run of what sports can be like.
“I don’t mean in terms of winning a Stanley Cup, but I mean what a room can be like,’’ he said. “What a work environment can be like when you find that special, special group of guys. To describe the relationship, I’d say they love each other. Truly care about each other and connect with each other.
“All the good things in this game actually aren’t the game. The hockey is great. We love the sport. But the best it can be is in a room like that. It was a brilliant year.”
Isn’t that it? Aren’t the best sports stories more than sports stories? And weren’t each of these teams such a great story it’s hard to even pick a best one?
Has any coach in the so-serious NFL allowed fun to creep into the attitude and on-field product like the Dolphins coach Mike McDaniel?
The Marlins made the playoffs with the National League’s worst offense. FAU went to the Final Four from a 3,000-seat arena that didn’t sell out most of the year. Miami is called a football school, and there was 73-year-old Jim Larrañaga dancing after beating top-seed Houston.
The Panthers went 7-0 in overtime games during the Stanley Cup run, to the point you expected Matthew Tkachuk to end each night joyfully waving his teammates off the ice.
Finally, has any team anywhere overcome a more soul-sucking loss than the Heat in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals against Boston? At home. At the buzzer. With the series won. And Derrick White delivers a haymaker to send the season back to Boston for Game 7.
Remember? Heat coach Erik Spoelstra looked at his watch afterward.
“At 11:35 right now, I have no idea how we’re going to get this done,’’ he said. “I’m as shocked by that play as anyone. I just know in the next 48 hours, we are going to figure this out.”
They did, too. So, no team outside of the Nova Southeastern Sharks won a title this year. So what? Sometimes there’s room for magic to be on the other side, too. Sometimes you can miss out on the champagne baths and championship parades and still feel it was the greatest year of all.
“We would have liked to be able to climb the mountaintop and be able to get that final win,” Spoelstra said after losing to Denver in the NBA Finals. “But I think this is a team that a lot of people can relate to, if you ever felt that you were dismissed or felt that you were made to feel less than.
“We had a lot of people in our locker room that probably have had that, and there’s probably a lot of people out there, you know, that have felt that at some time or another.”
Spoelstra is a known commodity in South Florida, so he merely confirmed his top talent last year. But look at the personalities who introduced themselves. The Panthers’ Maurice and Tkachuk were in first seasons here. Same for the Marlins’ Skip Schumaker, who was named the manager of the year.
FAU coach Dusty May rode his bike to work most days and had to step outside his cramped office space to take phone calls so as not to disturb everyone else working. He still does, too, even though taking his team to the maddest parts of March has changed so much.
FAU is ranked No. 7 this week as the calendar approaches 2024. So there’s hope the new year keeps delivering. Messi plays a full Inter Miami Season. Nova Southeastern has won 45 straight games and is ranked No. 1 in Division II.
The Dolphins play Baltimore on Sunday with the AFC’s top playoff seed on the line. So maybe last year wasn’t a one-and-done. Maybe it was the gateway to a Golden Age of South Florida Sports.
“We’re not done,’’ McDaniel said.
They’re not. But 2023 almost is. All that fun sprinkled among all those teams. Going, going …
I miss it already.