My Relationship with Hockey

This feels like an incredibly random post that is coming out of nowhere, but I've been thinking about it a lot and I need to write it out to get it out of my head before I go crazy. I can only talk it over to myself so many times before I go insane.

I'm Canadian. We like hockey. Like, a lot. I grew up on hockey, and I grew up in a hockey town. Really, only the part about me growing up in a hockey town is true. Saying I grew up on hockey makes it sound like I played as a kid and watched all the games and have been watching it all my life, etc. None of that is true. I didn't grow up playing hockey beyond gym class, and I really only watched snippets of games. What I mean is, I grew up watching hockey with my family. It's always been a family activity. My dad used to play in college and when he was growing up, and he played pick up with his friends when I was a baby. He has gear and posters hanging around the house, so it's just always been there. I know the basics of how the game works (get the puck into the net more times than the other team, etc.) and sometimes I'd catch highlight reels on the news of games that were on the night before. Recently, as I've gotten older and started using social media a lot, I've been using Twitter and Facebook to keep up with it. But I've never been die-hard. I never sat through every game and watched them all to the best of my ability and all of that.

This part is about to give away what town I'm from. If you know anything about hockey, you know who Auston Matthews is. 19 years old, 6'2, 215 lbs player from Arizona. He played in Switzerland for a couple years, came back, was drafted first overall by the Toronto Maple Leafs, and scored four goals the very first time he ever played in an NHL game. The very first night he played, way back in October, it was the only thing on Twitter and all anyone could talk about in any kind of news for days on end. I follow the local news outlets here, several of them, and all they were tweeting and retweeting were pictures and videos and gifs and reactions of this kid doing amazingly well. Everyone was obsessed with the whiz kid. He blew my fucking mind. I knew enough about hockey to know that that was a rare occurrence, if it wasn't made obvious by the Internet. It was all the highlight reels and the interviews and everything everywhere. All this kid. So, I started paying attention more. Before, if I came across a piece of hockey-related news, a highlight reel or something, I'd watch and then move along. Now, I was looking for them. I paid more attention because this kid was blowing my mind. Even I knew he was something special.

Every year, they play a special game outside on New Year's. Because this year is the Leafs' 100th anniversary of existence, they played here, on the soccer field they use for the Toronto FC. They called it the "Centennial Classic" and they made it a two day thing. NYE, they had a game with Leafs and Detroit Red Wings alumni that was a lot of fun, and they had the current team there too, walking around and getting to talk to the alumni players they grew up watching, and on New Year's, the current Leafs and Red Wings teams played. New Year's is my cousin's birthday, so the game was on at their house and we watched it as a family, as we always do, and it was so much fun. You get this indescribable adrenaline rush of nerves and excitement and hope and faith and fear and a million other things watching hockey, and it might be my favourite part of the entire game. After I got home and went on Tumblr,  I was just looking at pictures and videos and things of the players, and screenshots of their Instagram comments (because they honestly roast each other so hard it's so funny) and I got really into it. So then I started paying more attention.

A couple of weeks later, the All-Star Game happened. It's a complicated process to explain, but basically they have four divisions in the NHL, and they took players from teams that played in those divisions and made four teams with them, one for each division, and then they had a skills competition, and they have a tournament between the four teams, where two of them play each other and then the other two play, and then the winners of those games play each other, and then you ultimately come out with one winner. Auston, the boy who started this story, played for the Atlantic division team, and I did the same thing I did Centennial Classic weekend. I looked up pictures and videos on Tumblr of the game, and got really into it. Then, later that week, the Leafs started a four game road trip in Dallas and played the Stars. I didn't watch that game, but they lost horribly. Then, two days later, they played the Blues in St. Louis, and I saw on the morning news that they were going to be broadcasting the game on the radio, on a popular local sports station. So I thought about maybe listening, because I thought the game might not be on TV. Then I found out that it would be, but all the TVs were going to be occupied, so that was of no help to me. The game started at 9 pm St. Louis time, and I wasn't going to listen with my radio because my family are usually already asleep by then. Then I realized that the station probably had an online streaming function, which they did, so I listened to that for a little, and then the Blues started crushing my Leafs, and so I switched to watching it live, and then they lost and I was crushed. 

Two days later, Saturday night, they're playing the Boston Bruins in Boston. Now, this is a very big deal, because of playoffs and points and things I don't really want to explain, but also for morale, because they've lost the last three in a row (they lost to Philadelphia before the All-Star Game) and everyone's feeling pretty negative. I swear to God, that game was fabulous, but I almost died several times, screamed a lot, and had an adrenaline rush that lasted a full five minutes at least after it was over. They won 6-5 in regulation time, somehow, but they had a 4-1 lead and one of the rookies scored their first hat trick to get that lead, and then they coughed it up and Boston tied it, and then it was 5-4 Leafs, then Boston tied again, then it was 6-5 Leafs with a 1:30 left and they kept it that way.

I'm writing this after the disaster that was the Leafs/Islanders game on Monday night. I was on Tumblr while watching this, because that is where I have located my hockey community of Leafs fans, and I read an ask someone sent to someone I follow about how their friend has never liked hockey even though they love it to bits and suddenly in the last week has acquired jerseys and tickets and calls the players by their nicknames (because they all have nicknames) and how they felt really weird about how their friend was suddenly so into hockey and it made them uncomfortable because it felt like they were just jumping onto the bandwagon and didn’t genuinely love it. And I read the response that was written, about how they should just ask their friend about why they were suddenly into hockey right now and maybe it was just because you being into hockey your entire life made them be into it and etc. I don’t have a friend like this, one that’s super into hockey and now suddenly I am, so it didn’t make me feel bad about that. It just made me feel weird because I was suddenly very self-aware (and I knew this the whole time) about how weird it was that suddenly I was reblogging pictures and gifs of hockey players and teams I liked on Tumblr and structuring my entire life and schedule around when the Leafs would be playing so that I could watch games and staying up probably later than I should be to watch games and then sit on Tumblr afterwards and read people’s liveblog posts about them. I started watching game recaps, both by the NHL and sports fans, and reading stories about the team and following hockey-related Twitter pages and all this stuff. And I feel like a fake fan. Because I kind of am. I just got into it now, halfway through the season, for apparently no reason that I can really figure out myself if I’m being honest. I’m aware that everyone starts somewhere with their obsessions, and before you know it, it’s been ten years and you’ve been loving it all your life. I’m not there yet, obviously, so right now I feel stuck in “fake fan” territory. And maybe I’m right and maybe I won’t make it to next season and get bored over the summer and move on, or maybe I won’t even make it to the end of this season and in two weeks be telling all my friends about how weird it was that I liked hockey this much at all.

I probably won’t do that though. I’ve loved hockey all my life, on some weird level. It’s always been a background thing for me, something that was always there that I always knew I would enjoy, and always did enjoy when I did end up watching it some days. It’ll always mean family to me because it’s something that I enjoy doing with them and associate them with. Maybe I’ll fall off the wagon of watching every single game in a row and structuring my entire life around the Leafs’ schedule. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving it altogether. I’ve started teaching myself more about the background and how playoffs and points and stats work, and like I said, I’ll probably never be an expert in that and maybe never even fully understand them, but I’ll always love them.

Basically, in summary, hockey's always been part of my life and probably always will be. Whether I follow it this closely in future, Lord knows. But it's always going to be there. I'm Canadian, so I really have no choice there.