In 1972-73, Philly had two pro hockey teams. Here’s the wild story of the short-lived Blazers of the WHA.

Bernie Parent has now had a half-century to reconsider his fateful decision, but he won’t ever regret jumping to the World Hockey Association — a league so unstable it had him running back to the NHL months later.

The story, as we all know, led to a happy ending: Parent backstopping the Flyers to back-to-back Stanley Cups in 1974 and 1975.

“If you don’t do things, you remain at the same level all your life,” Parent, who turns 78 on April 3, told The Inquirer recently over the phone from his home in South Florida.

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Ahead of the 1972-73 season, Parent, who was out of contract with the Toronto Maple Leafs, became the first of several marquee NHL players, highlighted by Bobby Hull, to jump to the WHA, a brand-new league built to try and compete with the NHL. The then 27-year-old goaltender signed a five-year contract worth a reported $700,000 (plus a boat, car, and a house) with the Miami Screaming Eagles, one of 12 teams scheduled to compete during the WHA’s inaugural season.

Signing that big contract turned out to be the high point of Parent’s WHA experience, as the Screaming Eagles were unable to find a suitable arena in Miami and would ultimately never play a game.

“I was puzzled a little bit,” Parent said. “On the airplane on the way back, the team went from Miami to Philadelphia.”

The team would move to Philadelphia and be renamed the Blazers, which was fine with Parent, who had previously played four seasons with the Flyers after being nabbed from Boston in the 1967 expansion draft.

“I thought about it. You know what? To go forward is a good thing,” Parent says. “If things didn’t work out, I figured I could come back to the National Hockey League.”

It would not be that easy.

Parent was far from the only big name to join the Blazers. The team splashed “between $300,000 and $500,000″ on André Lacroix, a 27-year-old center who’d played four seasons alongside Parent with the Flyers.

Considering the money, the move was initially an easy decision Lacroix.

“I loved Philadelphia,” Lacroix, 77, recently told The Inquirer from his home in Northern Ohio. Referring to the late Flyers owner, he adds: “Ed Snider was one of the best owners I ever played for.”

They also signed Derek Sanderson, formerly of the Boston Bruins, to a record deal. Sanderson, a dashing playboy who had been named as one of America’s sexiest men by Cosmo, became the highest paid professional athlete in the world at the time after inking a five-year $2.65 million deal with Philadelphia.

Ideally, the Blazers would have played their home games at the 5-year-old Spectrum when the Flyers were not using the arena. But Blazers president Jim Cooper said the Flyers and Snider “offered game times when the Eagles are playing across the street at Veterans Stadium, when Santa Claus is making his rounds, in conflict with New Year’s Eve parties or in competition with Howard Cosell or Monday night football,” as The Inquirer’s Chuck Newman reported.

Instead, the Blazers signed a three-year contract to play at the 9,000-plus-seat Civic Center, which had opened in 1931. Their home opener was set for 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 13, against the New England Whalers. There was a problem. The new Zamboni arrived at 8:10 p.m.

The ice already appeared to be buckling, Lacroix told reporters that night — but it cracked even more after the Zamboni made a few passes on it. The game was postponed. Many in the estimated crowd of 6,000 threw orange souvenir pucks onto the ice.

Lacroix says, “I remember that like it was last night. The biggest mistake they made was giving them pucks on their way in.”

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Lacroix, laughing, added, “Derek [Sanderson] tried to apologize to the fans. We all went to the locker room, and Derek was trying to avoid the pucks coming down onto the ice.”

According to the Daily News, Sanderson told the crowd, “Please come back. We need your support after they get this bloody ice fixed,” before adding, “I hope you can get out of the building — the parking situation isn’t that great.”

The Blazers lost their first seven games to open the season and things would get worse. After a Nov. 25 loss to the Chicago Cougars, the Blazers were 4-16. Sanderson, the team’s massive investment, was already lost for the season after stepping on a piece of paper on the ice and severely spraining his back, ending his Blazers’ tenure after eight games and three goals. The Blazers bought out his contract after the season for a reported $1 million, and he returned to the Bruins.

“Philadelphia is the most negative sports town in the world,” Sanderson told The Inquirer from his hospital bed. (Sanderson, 76, did not respond to several requests to be interviewed for this article.)

The Blazers, backed by Parent, would rally under interim coach Phil Watson, though their home crowds remained slim, even after cutting ticket prices. Parent estimates only a few hundred people were in the seats on some nights, and never more than 3,000-4,000.

“That made me realize I wanted to go back to the National Hockey League,” Parent says, before adding, “What makes a good game is a good crowd – like the Flyers had at the Spectrum.”

Nevertheless, the Blazers won 16 of their last 25 games and finished third in the East Division. Parent played in 63 of the team’s 78 games and posted an .866 save percentage. Meanwhile, Lacroix led the entire WHA with 124 points.

“Bernie was all over the place on the ice,” Lacroix says of Parent’s late-season surge ahead of the playoffs.

But then Parent abruptly left the team over a contract dispute after the first playoff game, a 3-2 loss to the Cleveland Crusaders. And he stayed away. The Blazers were swept in four games.

“Some things I just don’t want to get into sharing,” Parent says 50 years later. “Everything happened at the right place at the right time for me to get back to the Flyers.”

After that season, Parent told The Inquirer that the Blazers had dipped into an escrow account that was created to pay his salary, essentially voiding the contract. So Parent intended to return to Toronto, where he’d benefited by playing as a backup to his idol, the legendary Jacques Plante. Jim Gregory, the Maple Leafs’ general manager, had other ideas.

Parent says, “He was a good general manager and a good friend, and he said to me, `I think it’s best for both of us to make a decision.’ Coming back to Toronto would have been very challenging,” given how Parent had left the Leafs a year earlier to join the WHA.

So Gregory traded the rights to Parent and a lower first-round pick to Philadelphia for a higher first-round pick, later completing the deal by acquiring Parent’s former goalie partner Doug Favell.

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The Flyers won the Stanley Cup the following season — and again in 1975. Parent says Bobby Clarke, the tenacious center and captain, was unquestionably the leader of those rugged “Broad Street Bullies” teams, but it is hard to imagine the Flyers winning those Cups without the magnificent Parent in goal. During that span, he put together arguably the most dominant two-year run ever by a goaltender, posting a 91-27-21 record, a 1.94 goals-against average, and a .926 save percentage while winning back-to-back Vezina and Conn Smythe trophies.

So it kind of all worked out.

“I was grateful to be chosen for a new team in a new league,” Parent says of his time with the Blazers, who would move to Vancouver after just one year.

But he also says, “If you want to be successful in life, want to do things in life, you want to take chances. If I don’t take that chance, I wouldn’t have come back to the Flyers and won the Stanley Cup.”