Time & Perspective Quote by Mark Messier

Messier is doing the veteran captain thing here: turning a question that begs for a single “best moment” into a lesson about what winning means to a place, not just a player. The quote is clunky on purpose, almost bureaucratic in its hedging (“if I had to,” “any of the two,” “fairly similar”), and that’s the tell. He’s not chasing poetry; he’s managing loyalties.

Context matters. Messier won Cups with the Oilers in the Gretzky era and then delivered the Rangers’ 1994 championship, ending a 54-year drought in New York. Comparing Edmonton’s first-ever Cup to New York’s long-awaited one is a diplomatic bridge between two fanbases that can get possessive about their hero. He’s careful not to rank them, because ranking would imply a hierarchy of belonging: which city “really” defines him, which locker room was “more” his.

The subtext is civic. Edmonton’s win is framed as a birth story (“first time to ever win”), New York’s as an exhale after decades of tension (“so long... since we had won”). Those are different kinds of hunger, but he flattens them into the same emotional category: collective relief. In doing that, Messier recasts his own legacy as service to a community narrative, not a personal highlight reel.

Even the repetition reads like someone replaying the crowd noise in his head. The point isn’t that the championships were identical; it’s that the feeling of delivering a city from waiting is the closest thing sports has to political capital.