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Kragthorpe: Utah fans are jumping on the Vegas Knights’ bandwagon, and why not? But remember, they pursued us first.

Team’s caravan stop in Salt Lake City helped build the fan base.

(Trevor Hagan/The Canadian Press via AP) Vegas Golden Knights' James Neal (18), Deryk Engelland (5), goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury (29) and the rest of the team celebrate after defeating the Winnipeg Jets during NHL Western Conference Finals, game 5, in Winnipeg, Sunday, May 20, 2018.

Michigan native Mike MacDonald wore a Detroit jersey and a Vegas cap when the hockey teams met in October. As he looked around T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas that night, the North Salt Lake resident guessed that three-fourths of the fans were backing the Red Wings.

The colors inside the building morphed into the gold, gray, red and black of Vegas as the season went along and MacDonald kept attending games with his partial season tickets. “Pretty cool to see that transition,” he said, as the Golden Knights more and more became Las Vegas’ team.

Utah’s, too.

As the Knights prepare to host Monday’s Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final vs. Washington, they’re positioned to become one of the most unlikely championship teams in sports history. The expansion club has stunned the NHL, united a community and made itself into a heartwarming story that captured fans in Utah.

The Utah Grizzlies are affiliated with the NHL’s Anaheim Ducks. The Los Angeles Kings, with Salt Lake City native Trevor Lewis twice having brought the Stanley Cup home in the summer, are popular in Utah, along with San Jose and Colorado, formerly the closest team geographically. Yet the Knights have caught on quickly around here.

This is not a case of Utahns climbing aboard the bandwagon just when this stuff is getting good. Oh, no. The Knights pursued us, way back in August.

Team owner Bill Foley, with strong ties to Montana, made sure the NHL included Utah in the Knights’ official territory and was determined to expand the team’s fan base throughout the Intermountain region. This explains how Hannah Smith found herself stumbling across the ice of the Salt Lake City Sports Complex and into the arms of Knights coach Gerard Gallant.

The Eagle Mountain resident agreed to join some friends in a skating party last summer when the Knights’ promotional caravan came to town with Gallant and assistant coach Mike Kelly greeting fans. Smith bought a Knights hat and asked the coach to sign it. Remembering how he had prevented her from falling, Gallant playfully pulled back the hat and said, “Promise me something: You’ll learn to skate better.”

(Courtesy photo) Hannah Smith, of Eagle Mountain, became a Vegas Golden Knights fan after meeting Coach Gerard Gallant during the team's caravan stop in Salt Lake City in August.

Sure enough, Smith has improved on the ice lately. So have the Knights, whose blitz through the Western Conference playoffs against Los Angeles, San Jose and Winnipeg has brought them into the Stanley Cup Final to conclude a remarkable season. Vegas features a bunch of players who proudly label themselves “misfits” after being unprotected in the NHL’s expansion draft. The Westgate Las Vegas Super Book gave the Knights a 200/1 chance of winning the Stanley Cup; other posted odds were as a low as 500/1.

Former Utah sportscaster Chris Maathuis, sports director of KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, recognizes a good story when he sees one after two decades in the market. If he needed any more confirmation that the Knights are a big deal in Las Vegas, the one-person focus group in his home provides the proof. Sandi Maathuis never asked about any sports news when her husband came home from work, but she wants to know about the Knights.

“If my wife’s paying attention,” Maathuis said, “there must be others who are just nuts about them.”

The anecdotal evidence says so. Knights jerseys and other memorabilia are being seen everywhere around Las Vegas, in a market where seemingly everyone is from somewhere else. “The community support is unbelievable,” MacDonald observed. “What it’s done is brought a lot of people together that were waiting for a reason to do it.”

The Knights’ response to the Oct. 1 concert shooting that claimed 58 lives further bonded the organization and its players with Las Vegas. And in a world where most pro teams close practices, even to the media, the Knights’ sessions in the Summerlin suburb are open to the public, with 500-plus fans often attending.

“They definitely have the town’s heart,” said Brian Millburn, who grew up in Ogden and recently moved to Las Vegas after attending Dixie State University.

Corey Christiansen, a Las Vegas native who lives in Cottonwood Heights, embraced his hometown team upon its arrival. “I never cared about hockey before, but when this happened, I said I’d be a huge fan of the team,” he said.

Christiansen stood on the plaza outside T-Mobile Arena with thousands of other fans during Game 4 of the Western Conference semifinal series vs. San Jose. “You felt like you knew everyone there,” he marveled.

Ryan Lambert, of Salt Lake City, labels Vegas “a easy team to like.” He attended the final regular-season home game March 31, when the team retired jersey No. 58 in honor of the shooting victims and projected their names onto the ice. The game is especially memorable due to William Karlsson’s short-handed goal becoming one of the NHL’s best plays of the year in an atmosphere that “felt like a Jazz playoff game or a college football game,” Lambert said.

Hannah Smith and other family members also were there that night. “They definitely put on a good show,” she said, citing the elaborate pregame production.

“Wow, incredible facility, just an amazing crowd, just a wonderful experience,” said her father, Rob.

Rob Smith has staged Knights watch parties with other Utah Grizzlies fans during the playoffs. The attachment stems from the team’s visit in August, when the coach propped up his daughter on the ice. The strategy of creating one fan at a time seems to have succeeded. “From that moment,” Smith said, “we followed them throughout the season.”