On a night when Denver raised a toast to its rise as a city of champions, the Colorado Avalanche partied like it was 1996.

You never forget your first one.

After celebrating the 30th anniversary of the championship run by Super  Joe Sakic, the late great Pierre Lacroix and alums of the ‘96 Stanley Cup winners at center ice in Ball Arena, the current Avs hopped over the boards  and blew away Florida 6-2 Thursday.

“This team knows what it takes,” said Claude Lemieux, an unabashed admirer of these Avs, who  remind him more than a little of his championship group from 30 years ago. “They’ve got quite a few players that were on the ‘22 Cup. And I think they could (win) the ‘26 Cup.”  

Thirty years. Goes by in a blink.

“When you’re in the middle of it, you don’t quite appreciate it as much as you should,” said Lemieux. “And then it’s gone.” 

Lemieux is now 60 years old. Half his life has passed since he drank from the Stanley Cup with former Colorado teammates.

This band of hockey brothers might have thinning hair and expanding waistlines. But the Avalanche alums have hearts full of gratitude, and when they reunite, there’s a gleam of snark in their eyes.

“Like we never missed a beat,” said Lemieux, cherishing how quickly and naturally teammates recaptured that championship feeling during the reunion. “Like being in the locker room again. Jabbing each other.”

Lemieux and his hockey besties on the original Avs began this city’s transformation into one of the world’s great hockey hotbeds.

How much has Denver grown as a hockey town?

Three decades ago, we were NHL dilettantes, a city that loved its DU Pioneers but had watched the Rockies bolt for New Jersey in 1982 with nary a tear.

Here’s one example of how blissfully hockey ignorant we were.

Shortly after Patrick Roy, his sport’s premier goaltender, joined the Avs from Montreal in a blockbuster trade in December 1995, we grabbed lunch together after practice at a bustling sandwich shop within shouting distance of the Denver Tech Center.

We stood in the deli line, sipped on our sodas and chatted for the better part of an hour without a single customer in the joint recognizing Roy or asking for an autograph.

“This is nice.I couldn’t go out to lunch like this in Montreal,” Roy said, as he enjoyed every bite of his sandwich. “Tell me, is it the same in Denver for John Elway?”

Well, no.

Denver was, is and forever will be a Broncos town.

So there’s no arguing against Elway as creator of our most beloved championship moment.

But more than 18 months before Elway’s iconic helicopter move in the Super Bowl, the Avs won the most transformative championship in Colorado history.

No major professional team had ever raised a championship trophy in Colorado until Charlie Lyons and Ascent Entertainment rescued the Nordiques from Quebec, Lacroix boldly reshaped the Avalanche roster and Sakic hoisted the Cup.

But I would argue the Avs infused Denver with a there’s-no-stopping-us-now spirit.

Although young professionals were flocking to Denver in the mid-1990s, the city retained more of the howdy-neighbor vibe of a dusty old cowtown than sprawling metropolis rising out of the plains.

The Broncos were guarded as a state treasure by folks who defiantly slapped “Native” stickers on their car bumpers.

In stark contrast, the Avs were as fresh and bodacious as the yuppies browsing bestsellers in a new bookstore called The Tattered Cover or sipping a craft beer at the Wynkoop.

You didn’t have to be from here to be a bona fide Avs fan.

Cheers for the hockey team made us all feel like winners and built a sense of community for America’s hot new city.

Thirty years later, Denver is a whole different place, with families entrenched in the distant burbs and a hole in the city’s heart still healing from the pandemic.

Florida, the underdog franchise that the Avs swept out of the Stanley Cup Final 30 years ago, is now the back-to-back league champion.

The Panthers, however, can also serve as a cautionary tale.

With captain Aleksander Barkov done for the season with a knee injury, as well as key contributors Matthew Tkachuk and Dmitry Kulikov fighting to regain their health, Florida doesn’t much resemble a serious contender now.

That championship magic can be gone in a blink.

This Colorado core of Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and Gabe Landeskog is playing like it knows the Avs can’t afford to waste another year on playoff disappointment.

Avs coach Jared Bednar viewed the ‘96 Avs being honored in the building as “a great reminder of where we want to go as a team.”

There’s no time like the present to make a happy noise that rocks the house the way Sakic, Forsberg and Roy did back in the day.

What this current group of Avs, along with a little help from their friends Bo Nix and Nikola Jokic, can do is put a fresh coat of championship paint on our dusty old cowtown.