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Ozzy Osbourne’s mugshot in a Blues shirt, so unintentionally iconic, has become part of the ӣ����Ƶ sports fabric (literally — it’s on T-shirts). Decades later, the image is ever-present, from social media to bars to an entire wall at a Hi-Pointe Drive-In location.

Sure enough, on the 2019 day of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, Osbourne’s Twitter account posted a new photo of him ... in a Blues jersey with the Stanley Cup patch.

This past summer, Osbourne died at 76. Around that same time, the Blues’ game-day presentation staff mulled over their annual pregame video, shown right before each game starts. In recent seasons, the video was an homage to music with ӣ����Ƶ ties.

“It just sort of hit us,” said Trevor Nickerson, the vice president/executive producer of Blue Note Productions. “It seemed to make sense: ‘Oh, this might be the moment.’ ... The light bulb went off.”

And at Thursday’s season opener at Enterprise Center, the Blues will unveil their two-minute, 20-second music video. It showcases a local ӣ����Ƶ band rocking in a garage to Osbourne’s song “War Pigs,” from Ozzy’s time with Black Sabbath. Twelve different Blues players are in the video, notably Robert Thomas, Jordan Kyrou, Colton Parayko, Jake Neighbours and Jordan Binnington.

“This is the last thing somebody sees before the players come out,” said Anna Goff, the Blues’ director of game presentation. “Now, the excitement is there for the players, but it’s our job using music video lights to visually express that excitement. It basically gives a cue to everybody in the arena that it’s go time — it’s happening now. ... Our entire open sequence will be centered around rock ’n’ roll and getting into that mindset.”

Sports, in this modern era, is dominated and fueled by visuals and videos. Every little thing that happens is ... something. And that something is often recorded and posted on social media. If a high school athlete even visits a college on a recruiting trip, the athlete is photographed — professionally and on a set — while posing in team gear, sometimes with the head coach.

So during any given season, pro and college teams have multiple staffers in charge of posting edited video content and game footage on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok or something cooler that I’m too old to have ever heard of.

This Ozzy video is a pretty big deal for the Blues. In fact, the Blue Note Productions crew who made it had previously won a Mid-America Regional Emmy Award for an intro video — and has been nominated other times, too.

This season’s Osbourne homage honors a rock ’n’ roll age of cassettes and Casio. The video features large speakers and amplifiers and, as Goff described, “players standing on what looks like the teeth of a cassette, and it actually rotates, like a sprocket.”

It was a two-day shoot, the first with the players, the second in the actual garage of a suburban ӣ����Ƶ home. The Blues brought in a local band, fittingly named Raised on Radio. And during a long shoot on a particularly hot summer day in a garage, the band members channeled their inner Prince of Darkness (Ozzy really was rock royalty).

“In the video, there are little Easter eggs in the garage,” Goff said. “We hung Ozzy’s mugshot in the background. We’ve got a couple sporadic Blue notes. The puck marks in the wall are all organic from (the homeowner’s) son. It’s true to the St Louis suburbs. You can see Ozzy in the back there — and a KSHE 95 poster, too.”

“So,” Nickerson said, “KSHE (94.7 FM) went on the air (with their rock concept) the same year we started (1967). We celebrate the same anniversary. So the two brands have been sort of synonymous with each other. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, that was our audience — KSHE 95 were our fans. Now it’s broken up a little bit since then because we’ve gotten a little younger, but we’ve been around 58 years and they’re the exact same. “

ӣ����Ƶ Blues: “Real Rock Hockey,” it seems.

In the weeks leading up to Thursday’s Blues opener against the Minnesota Wild, there was just one minor detail to attend to: edit the video.

I was astounded by how much time and effort this takes. I met ӣ����Ƶ native Brian Santa Maria — manager, media and content — in his dim-lit office, decorated by Blues bobbleheads (and one New Jersey Devils bobblehead of superfan David Puddy). As of Tuesday afternoon, Santa Maria had logged 80 hours editing the video (and 100 hours total).

“I feel pretty good about it honestly — and I felt pretty good during the whole process,” Santa Maria shared. “Having a strong concept and then being there when the visuals were shot, I walked away feeling like we’ve set ourselves up for success. A lot of times, you think you have enough, you think you shot enough and you get into editing and you’re like: ‘I wish we would have had this,’ or, ‘I wish we would have shot that.’ But in this case, we almost overshot. And so now I’m editing, and I’m going, like: ‘Man, I’m not going to be able to use half of the cool stuff that we shot.’”

As for Osbourne serendipitously entering the Blues spectrum, it’s a gift that keeps on giving, even from beyond the grave.

“We’re not like L.A. or New York that necessarily gets those big names attached a lot,” Santa Maria said. “So when we do, it’s cool. To have a name like Ozzy is pretty big.”

Sure enough, Osbourne’s memoir was posthumously released Tuesday. It’s titled “Last Rites.”