On Sunday, Jan. 6, the St. Louis Blues were in a tough spot, sitting last in the NHL’s Western Conference.
Five teammates went to a Philadelphia bar to watch the NFL playoffs the day before a game against the Flyers. During commercials, the bar’s DJ kept playing Laura Branigan’s 1982 synth-pop hit “Gloria.” The bar loved it, and the teammates picked the Blues’ new victory song then and there.
The next day, the Blues shut out the Flyers. “Gloria” never stopped playing, and the Blues kept winning.
The song has absolutely nothing to do with sports, Branigan has no connection to St. Louis, and it’s the opposite of the blues genre the team is named after. Branigan’s lyrics, reworked from the original 1979 Italian love song, try to give her friend Gloria the wake-up call she needs in her dating life. “Gloria, you’re always on the run now. Running after somebody, you gotta get him somehow.” (Maybe his name was Fred Stanley?)
But sports fans singing along get to shout “Gloria!” a dozen times, so it became a hit with Blues fans, conveniently coinciding with their miracle turnaround.
The team won 30 of its last 45 regular season games, securing a playoff spot. They dramatically advanced through the playoffs, winning each best-of-seven round in no fewer than six games to reach their first Stanley Cup Final since 1970.
On June 12, a 4-1 victory in Game 7 against the Boston Bruins gave the Blues the biggest glory in all of hockey: the Stanley Cup. It’s the first championship in the franchise’s 52-year history.
“Gloria” was promptly iced onto taunting cakes, covered by bands who happened to be in St. Louis that night, and played for 24 hours straight, 224 times in a row, on the radio.
Sadly, Branigan died of a brain aneurysm in 2004 and isn’t around to enjoy her song’s resurgence. But if her friend Gloria didn’t get her act together in 1982, perhaps its reawakening will inspire her this time.
Can a 37-year-old song with an infectious beat inspire a hockey team to get its act together? Their turnaround probably has more to do with Jordan Binnington, the goalie who fittingly saved the team’s season from the trash bin of history.
But consider the game where Binnington made his first NHL start: the Jan. 7 shutout where the team first celebrated by dancing not to the blues, but to “Gloria.”
