DENVER — The Stanley Cup weighs 35 pounds, but it’s not the weight of it that can crush you.

If you play in the National Hockey League and get so near it that you can see your reflection against the shiny names of the immortals, but never win it, that will weigh on you forever.

Scott Wedgewood not only saw his reflection but held the Stanley Cup, the last player to hoist it aloft triumphantly, after the Tampa Bay Lightning won it during the pandemic bubble in Edmonton in the surreal summer of 2020.

Wedgewood was the practice goalie called up from the minors and brought into the bubble so Lightning shooters like Nikita Kucherov and Steven Stamkos would have someone to pelt at the end of Tampa practices.

“Mathieu Joseph handed it to me, and then there was no one left to hand it to,” Wedgewood said Thursday of the post-Cup procession in Edmonton. “Stamkos said, ‘You want to hand it to Coop?’ I joked to a buddy, ‘I introduced myself to Jon Cooper, then handed him the Stanley Cup.’”

But the goalie from Brantford, Ont., didn’t “win it.” Wedgewood never played an NHL game, during the playoffs or regular season, so his name is not engraved with other Lightning players on the Stanley Cup.

“But that kind of lit a new fire,” Wedgewood, a career backup until this season, said. “And then it was, like, ‘Okay, I got to lift the Cup, but my name's not on it. So now let's get my name on it.’ I wouldn’t say the fire was out. But I would say that before that bubble, it was probably at its lowest.”

That he is still desperate at age 33 to get his name on the trophy is not surprising. But six years ago, after playing just 24 NHL games in his first eight seasons of professional hockey, that Wedgewood’s opportunity this spring is coming as the starting goalie on the Stanley Cup-favourite Colorado Avalanche would have been unimaginable to anyone but him.

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