A reminder of Minnesota's goofiest NHL season

The Wild and the North Stars have no connection as organizations, yet they are linked with Minnesota hockey fans in their 30s and beyond. That's why watching the Wild get blown out by St. Louis on Wednesday night in St. Paul took many of us back to the last gasp of the North Stars' run to the Stanley Cup finals in 1991:

Pittsburgh's 8-0 victory in Game 6 on May 25 at Met Center.

The 1990-91 season was without a doubt the goofiest in the combined 40 that have been played by the Wild (14) and the North Stars (26) – goofier even than Jacques Lemaire taking that flawed collection of Wild-ings to the Western Conference finals in 2003.

The North Stars of 1990-91 had a big advantage in goofiness based on Norm Green, who was in his first season of owner. He stayed only three in Minnesota, of course, before moving the franchise in Dallas.

The goofiness was raging in the spring and summer of 1990, as the Stars' owners, the Gund brothers, were lining up an expansion franchise in San Jose and selling the North Stars to Howard Baldwin and Morris Belzberg for $31.5 million.

On June 9, Baldwin hired Bobby Clarke as general manager. Ten days later, Clarke hired Bob Gainey as his coach.

It turned out Baldwin had everything but the financial wherewithal, and a late-arriving partner – Green, a Canadian real estate developer – bought 51 percent of the team in mid-summer. Then, he bought out Baldwin completely, to get 75 percent control.

Remember, the Timberwolves were in their second season here, and first at Target Center, and they were the trendy winter-time attraction in the Twin Cities.

Green had a bad team and was dying at the gate at Met Center. Norm went to a Wolves' game and decided that the secret of success might be cheerleaders in scanty clothes. So, Norm tried cheerleaders … at hockey games.

Didn't help.

The Montreal Canadiens came to Bloomington in mid-January and the crowd number was padded to reach 5,375. Norm called me before 8 a.m. the next day, and I think he was actually crying.

The North Stars wound up 27-39-14 for 68 points in 80 games. That was good enough for a place in the playoffs. Seriously. Twenty-one teams, 16 made the playoffs. The Stars were seventh in the West (and 16^th overall) in points.

All this while, the only local telecast of North Stars' games was on pay per view cable. The Twin Cities cable coverage in percentage of households was 206^th among 209 national markets. Tenty-five percent of those cable homes didn't have access to pay per view, even if the occupants wanted to pay $12.95 for a Stars' playoff game.

This didn't seem to matter to the public. As the playoff run continued, Norm was being treated by Met Center fans as a hero, as the man who had saved the NHL for the Twin Cities. Norm had a box with a dozen seats built in a corner of the arena. "Norm'' chants filled the building and he would wave to the crowd as Nero to the Romans.

On May 14, I had a column in the Star Tribune eviscerating my old pal Norm for his plan to continue the pay per view scam even for home games in the Stanley Cup finals.

The final paragraph for that column was:

"As the North Stars prepare for what should be this franchise's great moment, the man of the people is looking more like Norm Greed.''

Norm's popularity was at its zenith with the long-awaited Stanley Cup now two victories away.

I was driving home after the game, listening to Dark Star's late-night show on the Big Neighbor. Dark and I were buddies. We watched all matters of sports together. We went to San Diego annually, to bet horses at Del Mar and golf at La Costa.

Dark was reliving my "Norm Greed'' slur from a few days earlier on air. His topic for the night was: "Should the biggest newspaper in Minnesota have a sports columnist as negative as Pat Reusse?''

On my 20-minute drive from Bloomington to Golden Valley, the callers were unanimous in offering a resounding "no'' … Reusse had to go.

I often called Dark during breaks and did so on arrival home.

"This is great,'' he said. "You should see the phone lines lit up. They hate you!''

The Penguins took Game 4 at Met Center, won again in Game 5 in Pittsburgh, and the North Stars came back to Met Center for an elimination game.

Eight-zip.

The "Norm'' cheers were muzzled as the Penguins took a 3-0 lead after one period. When Joe Mullen made it 6-0 early in the third, the exodus started.