LOVE

A day behind already. Meant to get this done last night, life intervened.  

What can I possibly write here when I've written about little else for twenty years?

Other kinds of love, of course. When there's only one word for love, there are many different kinds.

Today I'd like to talk about my love of hockey.

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My earliest hockey memory: watching the Montréal Canadiens win the Stanley Cup in 1976, when I was four years old. Specifically I remember hearing Queen's We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions for the first time in the aftermath, instantly attentive to the STOMP STOMP CLAP, STOMP STOMP CLAP, then gobsmacked when the one song morphed into another -- they can do that?

I've never played because, quite simply, I can't skate. The closest I've come to playing hockey is detailed here and it's both sweet and beyond embarrassing. 

My Dad was a Maple Leafs fan, but more so a fan of the game. He instilled in me a passion for the Blue and White and an ironclad conviction that hockey is the best sport on earth. (For reasons beyond the scope of this blog I also believe the National Hockey League is the worst league on earth...)

I went to one game at Maple Leaf Gardens in, I think, would have been 1978 or 1979; my mom's date caught me a puck shot into the crowd by Leafs defenceman Ian Turnbull. Since then, I've been to a couple of games at the Air Canada Centre with my dad, and once I won a sales contest at work and got box seats (that was an experience). I've also seen a Marlies game (the Maple Leafs' farm team) and  Kitchener Rangers game with Eva.

Hmm. That just made me think. That Rangers/Belleville Bulls game was excruciating. Not because of the score (the Marlies won, 7-4) but because of the crowd. Somebody had a vuvuzela, which is one sound guaranteed to find my last nerve and pluck it, over and over. But even worse were the Bulls fans around us who never stopped chanting "BELLE----VILLE" in minor thirds all game. It's become a marital catchphrase here for when we don't want to acknowledge what the other person is saying. Just drown it out: BELLE---VILLE!"

Now the closest OHL team to me is...the Belleville Bulls.

I can't cheer for them because ugh BELLE----VILLE. That leaves the Peterborough Petes (don't like Peterborough much, it has a rough vibe) and the Kingston Frontenacs. Or I could just keep cheering the Rangers from afar. What to do, what to do. 

Why do I love hockey?

It has, to my mind, the perfect mix of skill and will, speed and finesse, offence and defence. It's not like basketball where nearly every possession is a goal; it's not like soccer, where sometimes there aren't even shots on goal. 

Hockey is graceful when it isn't brutal; hockey players are a breed apart. NHL history is littered with people playing, and contributing, when they ought to have been in a hospital. The toughness is baked in. A guy could have his legs amputated and the team would tell the media he was out with "a lower body injury". It's incredible. 

The sounds of hockey are captivating, best heard live: the slissshh of skates cutting the ice; the sharp crack of a crisp pass landing on a stick; the crunch of a check into the boards; and every once in a while somebody rings a shot off one or both posts with a CLANK that echoes to the rafters. 

For every sixty minutes of telecast, an NHL game has, on average, twenty seven minutes of game action. Compare that to football: barely three minutes of gameplay per hour of telecast. The choice is obvious. 

But it's more than that. There's a camaraderie in hockey that deeply appeals to me. Unwritten rules ban most ego displays. Hell, before the 1999-2000 season there were TIES. The idea of a tie really resonates. Any time you can play a game without a winner and a loser, you should do it, says I. 

Canadians invented this sport, but others have taken it and ran with it. A parallel hockey system arose in the Soviet Union: in 1972, the year of my birth, the whole of Canada shut down for an eight game series that people still recall today. We won, but it was a close thing.

Since then, many other countries have developed hockey pipelines to the NHL and several of them contribute star players way out of proportion of their country's populations. Take Finland, for example, the bronze winner in these Olympics. That team had several NHL superstars and could well have beaten us in the semifinals. 

Even the also-rans are getting better. Canada used to routinely demolish countries like France and Switzerland and while the talent gap is still wide, it's starting to narrow. As a hockey fan, I love this. It's great when a little pipsqueak country puts a scare into a power....or even beats them. The thing about hockey: you can thoroughly dominate  the skaters on the other team, but you still have to get pucks by the goaltender...and sometimes the goaltender simply won't let that happen.

Yesterday Canada's Olympic team played for gold and lost, in overtime.

It was a game they should have won. They outshot and outplayed the American skaters, but Connor Hellebuyck was sensational (and lucky) and Jack Hughes sent a dagger through our hearts in overtime.

It sucks to lose gold. It especially sucks to lose gold to the United States given current political and economic tensions. Sidney Crosby, the captain of Team Canada and one of the greatest players of all time, missed the semi and the gold medal game with an injury and that must really hurt for him.  I highly doubt he'll be around in 2030. Father Time catches up to everyone. 

Now we go back to our humdrum, stumblebum NHL season. The Leafs are going to miss the playoffs and seem to require yet another  rebuild. I swear this team is cursed. All the money in the world, and they spend it, but always on the wrong players. It's extremely frustrating if you let it be. I don'r, anymore. It's a game. It's only a game. 

Only the best game I know.