Mike Lange Was Unique In A Way That Simply Will Never Exist Anymore

The Penguins broadcaster - and my childhood idol - was a throwback to an era of unselfconsciously quirky local broadcasting that's long gone.

Mike Lange was my idol growing up. As a kid, I imitated his announcing style non-stop, calling play-by-play during our family driveway hockey games, acting out ‘hockey’ games with my action figures, and announcing (often out loud by myself!) every video game, from NES Ice Hockey to Blades Of Steel to the Sega EA franchise. I’d announce Street Fighter II matches out loud at the Monroeville Mall arcade (until people politely asked me to stop.) My parents saved grade school assignments where I had answered the standard “What do you want to be when you grow up?” question with “the next announcer of the Pittsburgh Penguins” — once I’d outgrown the standard “astronaut” response (BOOORING!) As a hockey-obsessed kid who never shut up, I simply couldn’t imagine a better career.

The accolades pouring in after Lange’s passing this week have shown that the degree of affection I have for him was hardly unique (besides maybe the “announcing hockey games played by Troll Warriors” part.) The outcry of pure reverence, gratitude, and nostlagia directed in unison towards Lange and his contributions to the Penguins franchise are universal to a degree you almost never hear anyone use to talk about anyone anymore. Lange’s voice, his style, and his mannerisms pierce through the sheen of cynicism we’re all required to adopt in Online Sports World Circa 2025, as though he’s been grandfathered in from some other era where any expressions of joy weren’t required to be immediately tempered by some automatic backlash so we could disagree and fight about it. Everyone just loves him and can’t say enough great things about him.

When I try to put into words why Mike Lange meant so much to so many people, two main factors come to mind. First, and most immediately, is how his consistency and longevity are so intertwined with so many of our childhoods. He was just always there, whether I was listening to a game on my bedside clock radio in my Squirrel Hill bedroom when I was 5, or hearing him call Sidney Crosby’s first goal on cable from my Queens apartment when I was 22.

When Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek died in 2020, show mainstay Ken Jennings wrote a tribute attempting to contextualize why so many people cared so deeply about him, and included this paragraph:

Alex was, rather, the last Cronkite of reliability. He was part of the fabric of America’s evening—the center of a gathering place for the whole country, even as media was balkanizing into a million little niches everywhere else. People invited him over every night for decades, just to hear the calming sound of his voice. He wasn’t just a broadcaster. He was part of the family.

This is why Lange and many other longtime team broadcasters end up feeling so important to fans: you remember listening to them as a little kid, as a teen, and as an adult. No matter what’s going on in your life, or in the world, or how much you and everything around you has changed, you still know that several times a week you’ll be hearing that voice calling out “HEEEEEEE SHOOTS AND SCORES!” How many other relationships in our life have that much longevity? I’ve been fans of plenty of athletes, actors, and musicians, but none of them are speaking directly to me for 2+ hours multiple times per week for 20 years. Very few of our real-life friendships, romantic relationships, and working relationships last anywhere near that long.

In Lange’s case, though, the appeal goes beyond just “he’s a good broadcaster who we listened to for a long time.” He was also unique and distinctive in a way that practically cannot exist anymore in our current culture.

Back in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, the internet and Center Ice cable packages didn’t exist. There was no way for anyone to hear Mike Lange or any local broadcaster unless you physically lived in the area and tuned into local television or radio. Occassionally, a Lange goal call might make its way onto Sportscenter or onto some “Hockey’s Greatest Goals” VHS compilation that you’d rent at Blockbuster and find out it’s mostly boring wrist shots getting lobbed past clueless goalies in the 70s. But only actual Penguins fans living in Pittsburgh could reliably tune in to full Mike Lange broadcasts. Other fanbases simply would never know our little secret.

Lange’s emphatic, nonsensical catchphrases became like an in-joke to Penguins loyalists. He clearly didn’t script them in an attempt to “go viral” — the concept of going viral, let alone anyone ever hearing Lange’s calls outside of fans listening to that broadcast in that moment — didn’t exist. And he didn’t write them in some attempt to ‘brand’ himself and climb to a higher career goal; he never left Penguins broadcasting in his life. He did them just for Penguins fans — as well as the players and Mario Lemieux’s mom — and Penguins fans knew it. If someone from out of town suddenly tuned into a Mike Lange game and heard “OHHH SHE WANTS TO SELL MY MONKEY,” and asked what that meant, you couldn’t explain it to them. Sorry, man, you had to be five and listening on your clock radio!

Nowadays, things that are this distinctly local simply can’t exist in the same way. I don’t mean that as a value judgment or as some Old Man Yells At Cloud “things used to be REALER” lament; it’s just an irreversable fact of the universally accessible media world we now live in.

For example, remember when the Flyers introduced Gritty? Within seconds online, everyone had their opinion on Gritty, which bounced between “who is this terrifying freak???” to “Gritty is good, actually,” speeding through the entire “thing” to “backlash to the thing” to “backlash to the backlash” cycle in a matter of hours. Now, Gritty has 1.2 million TikTok followers and a half million Instragram followers; everyone in the hockey world knows about Gritty. The people behind Gritty make fun content that reaches tens of millions of people, and it’s great! But no one would go to a Flyers game, see Gritty, and not know who he was. Local institutions can’t completely exist and thrive while walled-off from the masses for most of their existence anymore.

Mike Lange wasn’t just an exciting, talented, and unique broadcaster who provided the soundtrack for some of the greatest moments of our sports-watching lives; he’s also a throwback to a bygone era of pre-internet quirky localness that we’re never going back to. He belonged to us — like our own inside joke or hole-in-the-wall bar that only we knew about — and his absence hurts not just because his voice is intertwined with so many of our cherished memories, but also because we all know, without a doubt, that there simply will never be another one.

I’m sure other fanbases will read the tributes and have some idea of what Lange meant to Pittsburgh, probably likening him to our version of a Rick Jeanneret or Harry Caray. But they’ll never really know, because they couldn’t know — Lange came up in an era when, quite literally, you “had to be there.” Luckily for us, we were.