COLUMN ONE : Fans Come In From the Cold : After suffering through a quarter-century of agony and abuse, Kings backers are being rewarded with a trip to the Stanley Cup finals. Even the Melrose crowd and the Reagans have joined the frenzy.

It hasn’t been easy for Dave Levin, a compulsive hockey fan in a desert city where ice rinks depend on water from 350 miles away and the longest drought belongs to his beloved Los Angeles Kings.

The postal carrier from Van Nuys hasn’t missed a home game in 17 years, remaining true through a marriage, divorce, job change and--most notably--366 losses.

“I’ve had this expression for years: They can’t hurt me anymore,” Levin said Sunday.

For Levin and thousands of other closeted hockey fans across Southern California, a quarter-century of pain and ridicule has suddenly given way to euphoria as the Kings--for those still in need of a translation, the Rodney Dangerfields of the ice--advance to the final round of the National Hockey League playoffs for the first time in franchise history.

Tuesday night, the Kings will enter the other Forum--in Montreal--to take on the Canadiens, one of the most celebrated teams in sports with 23 Stanley Cup championships and a tradition spanning a century. The Kings got there Saturday night by beating another storied Canadian team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, in the final game of a seven-game series.

The Kings’ unexpected rise to stardom means sudden redemption for a long-suffering hockey subculture in Southern California.

Ever since the franchise arrived in Los Angeles in 1967 as part of league expansion, a small knot of transplanted Easterners, Canadians and even home-grown Southern Californians have taken to the team as loyally as any Lakers or Dodgers fan.

“Sometimes you had to have a sense of humor about it,” said Doris Bird of Sylmar, a 61-year-old grandmother who has followed the Kings their entire 26 years. “Some years, you didn’t figure they would do much more than barely get through the season.”

About 1,100 people belong to the Kings Booster Club, flying to games around North America, meeting for pizza and beer, and, most important, honoring age-old superstitions about winning. Levin sports the same white shoes, pants, polo shirt and jersey (with the number 11--a play on his name--on the back) to every Kings game, while Bird, president of the club this year, also has a game-night dressing ritual, down to her shiny black boots.

Desperate for luck, some fans grow beards; others shave them off. About 10 years ago, hoping to push the team into the next round of the playoffs, Levin smuggled a razor and thermos of hot water into the Forum and shaved at his seat. The Kings lost, and he now grows a beard each playoff season.

“It has never been so thick,” he boasted Sunday.

Last week, in a letter to Kings management, longtime fan Alice Mishica of Newport Beach blamed a home playoff loss to Toronto on the use of a substitute vocalist who sang the Canadian and American national anthems. The great winners of all time, she wrote, never disrupt the pattern of winning ways.

“Jesus fished before visiting the lepers, Sampson never cut his hair, Columbus ate bagels for breakfast, Lincoln wore his steeple hat, Roosevelt had his pipe, and Kings have Warren Wiebe,” Mishica wrote of her preferred vocalist.

Outside this cloistered world, the Kings’ success has captured the attention of Los Angeles like never before, making hockey fans out of the most unlikely Southern Californians. Electronic messages on RTD buses read “GO KINGS!” while Kings memorabilia sells at a pace rivaling the frenzy five years ago when Wayne Gretzky, held in such awe by hockey fans that he is nicknamed “The Great One,” was acquired from the Edmonton Oilers and the Kings changed their official colors to black, silver and white.

The Kings Slap Shot shop in Westchester opened two hours early Sunday to accommodate a throng of fans, unloading 1,200 playoff T-shirts in four hours. Merchandise manager Renee Gonzalez said many of the customers were new to hockey.

“It is easy to tell,” she said. “They ask how can we buy tickets, and everyone knows the tickets have been sold out for two rounds.”

The Kings have gotten La Canada High School senior Sandra Frields so excited that she has taken up skating and two weeks ago skipped school to stand in line for the last batch of playoff tickets--which sold out in an hour. Last year, the Kings became the first professional sports team in Los Angeles to sell out its entire home season, a statistic veteran Kings fans like to cite to their Lakers counterparts.

“A couple of months ago, Wayne Gretzky was all I knew about the Kings,” said Frields, who started skating in February. “At this point, I can tell you anything you want to know about any of those players.”

More than 200 people crowded into the Iceoplex in North Hills on Saturday to watch the team win a Stanley Cup berth on television. The Kings official practice rink plans to add more big-screen TVs for the final round. The team’s corporate offices have been flooded with flowers, baked goods and cards from fans across Southern California, and the ever-growing list of celebrity watchers at the Forum now includes Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

“People are just so happy, they want to let us know,” said Kings spokeswoman Michelle Guler.

Even in one of the stranger shops on Melrose Avenue, a continent and culture removed from the wholesome back-yard scrimmages of Quebec, hockey has arrived--albeit L.A. style. Pass through a corridor painted in psychedelic colors and lined with fun-house mirrors, and you’ll come upon Linda Aronow, a Los Angeles native with sheet-white skin, black eye makeup, painted black eyebrows, a shoulder tattoo--and Kings jewelry.

“I don’t think people see me as a hockey fan,” Aronow confessed, “but I’d rather spend my money on a Kings ticket than anything else.”

Aronow is manager of Wacko, a card and novelty shop that sells barking dog toy guns, Godzilla dolls and flying pigs with human sex organs. Apart from a removable tattoo, there is no Kings memorabilia for sale here, but an entire wall behind the cash register has been reserved as a tribute to the team.

A plastic skeleton tacked to the wall lambastes former National Hockey League Commissioner John Ziegler (the unpopular NHL official who stepped down last year), while a hand-printed placard mounted after the Kings’ second-round playoff victory over Vancouver declares: “The Curse Is Over.” Until this year, the Kings had never won two playoff series in one season.

On Sunday, Aronow answered the telephone: “The Kings are going to the cup!” while she prepared a new sign for the wall: “The Cup Stops Here.”

“The owner here is very tolerant,” Aronow said with a smile.

Down the street at Wild Bill’s art gallery, a poster-size painting of Wayne Gretzky has stood in the doorway for the better part of a week. Painted by artist Samantha Wendell, it sells for $600, but so far has been more of a good luck charm than a sales success. Gallery manager Michael Ross Verona said Gretzky is recognized by Japanese tourists and local high school students alike.

“He sure is a good role model for a lot of kids,” Verona said. “And the Kings are just great for the city. They are helping to give back L.A. its former positive appeal by pushing the riots and other crap to the side.”

For Canadians, even some of those who now call Los Angeles home, the Kings’ ascent brings with it all the joy of the sinking of the Titanic, a catastrophe beyond description. Hockey is life in Canada; the Parliament even has a National Hockey Caucus to track the game. What is Los Angeles doing messing with the Canadian national pastime?

“In Canada, kids grow up playing hockey on ponds and flooded back yards,” said Anna Nordin, a former college goalie in Toronto who moved to Malibu two years ago. “I can count the number of ice rinks here on one hand. This is just too hard to fathom.”

Traveling Kings fans say some of the nicest hockey people they meet are from Canada, but there is often an underlying condescension toward Southern Californians who love the game. Booster club President Bird said she was interviewed by a Canadian television reporter earlier during the playoffs who assumed that she followed the Kings for all the wrong reasons--that is, to gawk at celebrities.

“I told him I love the skill of these guys on skates, the hand-and-eye coordination, and the speed up and down the ice,” Bird said. “It wasn’t exactly what he expected.”

Nordin said the Kings’ success has been all the more difficult for Canadians to accept because it has been spearheaded by their greatest export of all time: Gretzky. And most people in Los Angeles could not care less, she said.

“Hockey fever here means people want to know the score of the game,” Nordin said. “I think it must have something to do with the climate.”

Gretzky’s arrival in Los Angeles has also stirred some resentment among the Kings’ faithful. The superstar single-handedly put Los Angeles on the hockey map, but his multimillion-dollar contract also propelled Kings’ owner Bruce McNall to increase ticket prices, making games unaffordable for some fans. Gretzky and his wife, actress Janet Jones, also set off an avalanche of interest in Hollywood, leading to a parade of movie stars at most home games.

“It has become a trendy thing,” said Bird, a season ticket holder who could not afford to buy her season seats for the playoffs. “Where were all of these guys when you needed them?”

None of that, however, takes away the glory for Southern California’s least-rewarded fans, those whose memories of the Kings predate the Gretzky era and Stanley Cup finals, recalling instead images of purple and gold jerseys and half-empty arenas.

“It has been a long, long time,” said Levin, who keeps an ongoing computer tabulation of the Kings performance. “I just hope this city goes crazy.”