That said, I'm pretty proud of the words spilled below so take a look if you are so inclined. (I'm really bad at asking for things, which is why I'm not begging you to read it and pass it on to all your friends to show them my brilliance and get me a job somehow because it will enter the stream and someone will catch a glimpse of my promise and things will go from there. Because that's how things happen in my brain. But you should. Ya know, if you want.)
I’ve been trying, and failing, to explain why it is that I
love hockey so much. But I'm taking a final stab at it. I promise (hesitantly) that this it. I'll shut up about why I love it after this. (Probably.)
I can’t simply say, “In a life of suck, one of the few
things that makes me not want to slit my wrists is watching hockey.” I can’t
say that because then psychologists get called and people worry and that’s bad.
But it’s also true to a certain degree.
However, it’s also so much more than that. I just…how do you
even begin to the find the words to explain something that’s mere sport? How do you explain
that two years ago it was like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle clicked when you
finally drank in this game? Your brain went, “Aaahhhh, now I get it! Everything makes so much more sense! Colors are brighter! The stars more twinkly!” How do
you explain that the more you watch, the more you fall in love with the chaos,
and yet careful choreography, that is 10 rather large men trying to kill each other
over getting a piece of frozen rubber into a net? I likely can’t. But it’s not
going to stop me from trying. Again.
I think some people were born with a certain lightness, a
happiness and bounce that makes their stride through this world fairly easy. I
also believe deeply that some of us weren’t. We’re a little bit darker and prone to having a harder time with the burdens of living. I don’t
mean this in a suicidal or morose way, I just mean we’re more aware of how
dark this world can be and the trials we face as humans. Not even our individual
and specific trials, but of the general difficulties of all of us. It’s a sort of empathy?
I had thought that perhaps that light versus dark was
something that was cultivated. We all started out as happy, carefree babies. Then,
later, a choice is made, sometime in our teenage years perhaps, to be optimistic and believe in the general good of humanity
or be slightly more cynical and have an acute awareness of the awful things human beings do to each other. Now I'm firmly of the mind that it’s more innate. I,
obviously, fall far more on the cynical end of the spectrum. Not that I’m some
special snowflake. I get along well with my fellow misanthropes. (The irony of getting along with fellow misanthropes is not lost on me.)
However, I don’t see this darkness as a necessarily bad
thing. Partly because I possess this brand of cynicism, sure. But also because those of
us who don’t find truth and beauty everywhere
are far more attuned to the rare glimpses that we do get. When your standard operating procedure is to be generally skeptical of everything, you know when something truly special is happening. And because it’s such
a rare occurrence for us, it can transfix us. And it can change us. I get a
glimpse of transcendent beauty when I watch hockey.
I love hockey because it’s beautiful. Because every scratch of a blade into the ice is an artful
representation of physical prowess I will never possess. Because for 60 minutes
of play, guys slam into the boards with reckless abandon. Because falling in
hockey is not something to be avoided, like we so carefully do in our daily life, but
something done purposefully to block a shot, throwing yourself and then sliding along the ice to get in front of a cylinder of frozen rubber, to keep it out of
the net. I love hockey because a goalie, defying all logic and good sense, positions
himself between that flying puck, that has been hit with such force that it is now traveling at up to a hundred miles per hour, and the
twine. Hell, most of the sport involves behavior that defies logic and good sense. The thunderous clashes into the boards, the sticks being wielded not really caring where they strike. The sheer violence of the game. No truly sane person takes up a sport played on a sheet of ice while wearing razor sharp skates (that can inflict their own damage (that's a serious injury, not for the squeamish)), holding a stick and chasing a piece of rubber. I sort of relish their insanity. They love this game, devote everything to it, no matter what it costs them. (And there are cautionary, heartbreaking tales of what it can do to you, to be sure.)
I love hockey because somewhere amidst what feels like utter
chaos, you start to get a sense of what is going on. You begin to see lanes
develop. Sometimes this is good. Your guy breaks away on an odd man rush and
before it even happens you know that he’s gonna hit the back of the net
whenever he pulls up and shoots. Other times, it’s not so favorable. You see
Anisimov bend around the back of the net, hamstring Mike Green and you just
know, it’s going in. There is nothing you can do to stop it. You try to will
the puck not to go in, but it doesn’t work. You possess no power from your
couch 3,000 miles away from the action. Not that that stops you from trying.
As you immerse yourself in the game, you begin to understand, without being told, what cycling the puck is and tic-tac-toe passing. What at the beginning of loving hockey seems like shoddy passing and poor shooting and sticks flailing everywhere with abandon, a lack of control, you begin to understand has structure and logic while still looking frenetic. You start to make calls before the whistle blows, knowing when a play is offsides, as players dance in the neutral zone near the blueline. You know what a slash looks like or goalie interference or boarding and you yell at the refs for the 800 times you see it happen to your team and not get called but they're happy to call it to the benefit of the opposition. (No fan of any sport anywhere is ever satisfied with the refereeing.)
As you immerse yourself in the game, you begin to understand, without being told, what cycling the puck is and tic-tac-toe passing. What at the beginning of loving hockey seems like shoddy passing and poor shooting and sticks flailing everywhere with abandon, a lack of control, you begin to understand has structure and logic while still looking frenetic. You start to make calls before the whistle blows, knowing when a play is offsides, as players dance in the neutral zone near the blueline. You know what a slash looks like or goalie interference or boarding and you yell at the refs for the 800 times you see it happen to your team and not get called but they're happy to call it to the benefit of the opposition. (No fan of any sport anywhere is ever satisfied with the refereeing.)
Even as certain aspects of the game begin to make sense, hockey still delights in its utterly fluky nature. More
than once I've seen even the players looking up at the Jumbotron trying to figure out
just how, exactly, the goal occurred. It seems miraculous. One second it’s on
the tape of the stick, the next it’s behind the goalie. Sometimes it's in the corner and then in. Sometimes it bends in seemingly impossible ways. Once (though likely more than once) it bounced off the glass behind the goal and in. Only after three or four replays of a goal does credit to who scored even get established. Sometimes the puck is
buried under a mess of bodies in front of the net and manages to be poked through. Sometimes your team is crashing the net, putting relentless pressure on the opposing goalie, but no matter what, that damn puck won't find its way across the line. That can happen because the goalie manages to know innately where the puck is to cover
it up. (Like Jonathan Quick impossibly does here.)
And the goalies! Is there a weirder, more mythical beast in
sports than the goalie? Maybe the closer in major league baseball. But only
maybe, because a closer you can see, standing in the very middle of all the action, only his hat brim shielding him. The goalie is in full on battle regalia.
He has a mask that obscures most of his face. He wears monstrous pads. And
because, as mentioned, his job is to purposely stand in front of speeding, frozen, cylindrical rubber, he’s a little off. Adorably off. Just listen to anything Bryzgolova
says ever. Catch up on my beloved Holtby’s warm-up routine. Even the unflappable
and gorgeous King Henrik has his own quirks and prefers you don’t talk to him
before he takes the ice, as he blasts late ‘90s Blink-182 in his headphones. (A
man after my own high school heart.) But I adore these idiosyncratic guardians of the net. The Holtby-Peverly gif.
will go down as one of my all time favorites. Holtby stands there, arms across his chest, mask on, stick off to
the side as Peverly takes a whack at him (that he doesn't actually connect on) the only thought that permeates my
still female brain is, “Knight in shining armor.” He has his sword and armor at the ready. But instead of standing watch outside a castle, he stands on skates in front of pipe and net.
The rest of the players are no slouches either. Hockey
players play hurt. While I’ve spent a lifetime
following baseball and heard of pitchers sent to the DL for blisters on their
pitching hand or had football players sit out for turf toe, I, in my youthful arrogance, would roll my eyes and wonder why they couldn't play through. Those injuries don't sideline a player in hockey. Yes, player safety. No, some of them should not return, especially
when they are running on pure playoff adrenaline and probably the worst
possible judges of their own health. But in hockey, when you drop the gloves,
get punched, and need a few stitches, you get sewed up by the team doctor and
you bet your sweet ass you better have yourself back out on the ice as soon as
possible. Puck to the face and stick to the chin lead to the same: get back out
there. It is the toughest of tough probably matched only by rugby. There are no excuses in hockey. "It doesn't really hurt that bad after awhile anyway," says Mike Knuble in that link. All your excuses are invalid.
Hockey injuries are cloaked in mystery. “Upper body, day to
day” is about as much information as a team is obligated to give. Only after a
playoff series wraps do the injuries get fully explained. The Bruins faceoff
specialist was missing in the dot for the last couple games in the their series with the Capitals. Faceoffs are vital
because, as Mikkael Boedeker on the Coyotes said so eloquently on NHL Live a week or so ago,
“You win faceoff, you get puck.” Yes, yes you do. (He’s a Dane. That
his interview wasn’t exceptional makes sense, with English not being his given language.) Puck possession,
naturally, logically, leads to goal scoring which leads to wins. You need
someone good in the circle to get initial possession. But for the last few games of the series, Bergeron was missing from faceoffs. It was intimated he
was injured or he’d be in there. Only after the series do you learn that he
TORE HIS OBLIQUE. Not that that stopped him from playing. It merely stopped him
from hunching over to take faceoffs. Oh, and he had a broken nose, but that’s an immaterial footnote to this particular story.
No player will ever use
his injury to explain away or mitigate the loss on the ice. It’s really quite
remarkable. Normal people, like, well, me, are felled by the slightest of sinus
headaches. These guys rip their own teeth out on the bench and return to play. That's not hyperbole. (Again: not for the squeamish.)
The sport is brutal and rough and because I am the way I am, I am drawn to that. But it is also graceful and slick and surprising in its beauty. As much as I love hard hits, I also love watching guys on open ice at full speed, or the backhand forehand backhand stick handling as they skate up to the goal on a breakaway. Even though it's the skills competition, shootout goals can be gorgeous. (Added bonus of making Tim Thomas look absurd.)
I ask that the hockey gods let them prevail. I ask that for 60 more minutes, and then 60 minutes after that, and then for any combination of 8 more 60 minute games, the Caps play perfectly and the pipe is kind and the hits don't hurt and the puck finds the net through Henrik Lundqvist and then Martin Brodeur and then either Jonathan Quick or Mike Smith. If the game takes longer than 60, even much much longer than 60, I hope that the hockey gods remain on their side.
But. Even if the Caps lose, even if the season of my team ends, it's not ever going to stop me from loving this sport and hoping others come to love it too.
After spilling some three thousand words trying to explain what about hockey matters and why it should, I finally realized it's really quite simple: hockey makes me happy. What a weird sensation.
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