Seeing Stars

 

The Tampa Bay Lightning fulfilled their purpose and eliminated the Islanders in six games to win the eastern conference final. YES!!!! Despite my earlier intention to support them through the Stanley Cup final, however, I have changed my mind. It seems I’ve adopted the Dallas Stars as my championship team for the COVID-19 Cup.

But, Ru, what the ... ?

You may well ask. I didn’t mean to cheer for Dallas, but I accidentally watched the last couple of games in their series against the dishonourable Knights. Ter gets the blame for that – she’s the one who flipped the channel to prove if there’s a game on, we’ll watch it. The captain of the Stars (Jamie Benn) grew up in Brentwood Bay, the same community where Ter and I lived as teenagers before we met. It’s a small thing, but enough to pick a team for the duration of a game. That, and I was still mad at Vegas for the second empty net goal against Vancouver.

At the end of game five, Ter announced her support for Dallas to win the Cup. Not only could she not raise any enthusiasm for Tampa, she liked the idea of backing “Brentwood” Benn. I kind of agreed, but I’ve disliked Dallas in the past and, compared to my general indifference to the Lightning, that weighs more.

I waffled some when game six (the elimination game for Vegas) ended with the Stars’ overtime victory. It happened on the dumbest penalty call ever invented by the NHL: the infamous “delay of game”. By accident or design, when a player sends the puck goes over the glass in the defensive zone, it’s an automatic two-minute minor. I have no problem calling it when by design, but the puck glancing off the shaft of a stick engaged in a battle for said puck, I don’t see that being deliberate. Honestly, they delay the game by calling delay of game when they could treat it like icing or offside calls: just get another puck and have a faceoff. Anyway, it’s what happened to the Knights. Dallas scored on the power play and that was it: series over. On a dumb delay of game call that was clearly an accident. I was outraged at the injustice.

Then I remembered the snotty second empty net goal against Vancouver. Suddenly the hockey gods were repaying karma and I was good with the Dallas win. I was also a toe closer to going the distance with them, but not there yet.

At the start of Game One of the final round, Cardigan asked me which team I was hoping would win. I replied that I wouldn’t know until the first goal was scored. If I cheered, that was my team. If I swore, it wasn’t.

Dallas scored first. I cheered. Decision made.

Go, Stars.

Season Finale

3 cups in 6 years - one more and they'll have a quart

The Chicago Blackhawks have won their third Stanley Cup in six years. Good for them! It’s hard to win one in this age of salary caps and unrestricted free agents, but team management was able to keep the core group together, led by the truly indomitable Jonathan Toews. That kid (kid?? He’s twenty-seven years old!) is the James T. Kirk of the NHL. I’ve seen him carry that team on his back when they’re slumping, and in a duel of captains in the final series, he showed will and grit that Steve Stamkos only dreams of having.

I should probably dislike the Hawks the way I dislike the Islanders; after all, that twerp Patrick Kane scored the OT winner in Game 7 against the Flyers in 2011 and it took me all summer to get over it. Meh. It’s enough for me to not like Patrick Kane. I do like that the whole team gave Roberto Luongo conniptions in various playoff series over the Vancouver years, again led by their Valyrian steel captain.

I paid off my playoff pool debt and collected my regular season pool winnings, yesterday. When the math was finally done, the whole enchilada cost me $5 and gave me the dubious distinction of being one half of the first-ever tie for a money spot.

So hockey mania is over for another year.

Well, three and a half months.

Hawk Trumps Bear



2013 Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks



I won’t say that I was totally engaged with the Stanley Cup playoffs this year, but as the rounds went deeper, I watched more of the games. It became a case of voting out the teams I cannot endure, so I was content with Chicago getting to the final for the west. In the east, however, my will was consistently foiled. Pittsburgh is my second string favourite after Philly, but when the Boston Bruins shut down Sid Crosby and the Penguins and advanced to the Cup final, I started to fret.

And foam.

And use poor language.

I loathe the Bruins. Can’t say why, I just do. I think they’re a bunch of goons, and being a Flyer fan of old means that I know goons when I see them. I like their goalie, though. He’s deadly cute, for one thing, and Finnish for another. I like Finnish goalies. They’re steady, efficient, and reliably cool under pressure.

The Blackhawks are young, slick and skilled. I’ve had their captain in the office hockey pool for three years in a row. Patrick Sharp and Michal Handzus are both ex-Flyers. The team bit Detroit in the collective butt in round two, coming back from being down 3 games to 1 and winning in seven. Phew. So I reckoned, if they ran circles around the Bruins and tired out the lumbering oafs, they had a good chance of winning the Cup.

And they did. They had to work for it (winning the Stanley Cup is easy, after all – you just have to win 16 games), but by the gods’ dainties, they did it. How they did it I really don’t know; they were stonewalled at almost every turn, but in the end, I think they did exhaust the oafs. They got hit, they got up. They got scored on, they scored back, even if the game meant going to overtime – and it did. Three agonizing times. They were even shut out in one game, thanks to the deadly cute Finnish goalie. Back and forth, up and down, amid stupid penalty calls and stupider non-calls, the Hawks refused to go away. And last night, just as we were resigning ourselves to a seventh game, Bryan Bickell popped one past Tuukka Rask (I told you he’s Finnish) with something like a minute and a half left in the third period. Now the game was tied and yet another overtime looked imminent. I was just thinking about making tea for the duration when Ter suddenly yelled, “He scored!”

Yup, seventeen seconds after Bickell’s goal, Dave Bolland got another past Rask and it was a done deal. No way could the Bruins come back within the remaining minute, not with their loutish lineup. Hats and horns! The Hawks won their second Cup in four years, and this time I enjoyed it (the first time they beat the Flyers and became anathema until this year).

Everyone is at different stages on the great cosmic journey and Love is the only rule. Kindness, acceptance, tolerance, fairness – they’re all principles in which I implicitly believe. Generally, I live by those principles. However, when it comes to hockey, I become a tiny, petty, egoically-identified cretin whose greater delight stems not from the Hawks winning the Stanley Cup, but from the Bruins not winning it. Yep, it’s small. I’ve pondered my shrivelling wickedness, and I’ve decided against apologizing for it. No one died, no homes were lost, everyone kept his job (unless you’re a coach), the world looked the same this morning as it did last night and, as my father always reminds me, it’s just a game.

Sure, Dad.

Hockey Woes of a Hockey Ho

#16, Captain Bobby Clarke
circa Ru's Hormonal Ignition

When I was growing up, Hockey Night in Canada was nothing more than the program that ran after The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. At that point, my parents were affluent enough to have acquired a second TV, a portable black and white, to solve the burgeoning viewing issues between the men and the women in the house. My father and two brothers would disappear upstairs at 8:00 on Saturday night. I’d stay in the living room with my mother, two sisters and the “big” TV. I don’t remember what we watched, but at infrequent intervals, the war cry of the male sports fan would shake the walls from upstairs: “He SCOOOORES!!”

Flash forward to February 1974. The family had relocated to BC, save the firstborn son who stayed in Ontario to pursue his own path. My second brother (“the Handsome One”) was about to be married and my father was about to lose his hockey-watching buddy. Mum took my sisters and me aside to suggest that Dad might appreciate it if his daughters developed some interest in the Great Canadian Game. It didn’t have to be an obsessive interest, but enough that one of us could sit with him for a while and know something of what was happening on screen.

In typical Ru fashion, I took it to heart.

One day I wandered into the living room where Dad was watching his beloved Toronto Maple Leafs. I plunked myself onto the sofa and asked who they were playing. It turned out to be the Philadelphia Flyers.

Talk about a destiny point.

I decided—because I always enjoy contradicting my father—to stay the course and root for the opposition to his team. Harmless fun, right? Only I was almost 14 years old and got a glimpse of the Flyers’ captain. Whoa-ho-hoaaa, Nellie! Flowing blond curls and an angel face. He was missing his front teeth and had a potty mouth to boot, but apparently I’m good with that for I fell immediately in love.

From that moment, I was a blood-and-bone Flyer fan.

They won back-to-back Cups during my first two years and haven’t seen one since, though they got pretty darned close a few years ago. Captain Bobby Clarke has graduated from legendary warrior hero to management scum, but I still wear a jersey with his name and number on the back. For years, Dad and I spent every Saturday and Wednesday night in the den downstairs, watching hockey no matter who was playing. We saw the Edmonton Oilers in their gangly, coltish youth (Paul Coffey was a serious threat to Clarkie for a time) and I tried to change my allegiance to a Canadian team so full of energy and promise. I did well, thanks to #7, but when the Flyers came to town, I accidentally cheered when they scored on the Oilers. That was a sign.

I bleed black and orange.

I lost touch for a while. Young adulthood has different priorities, but I was always aware of the Flyers. Dad kept me apprised, with the regulation plethora of sarcastic sidebar comments attributed to embittered Leaf fans, but I didn’t watch a game for almost a decade. I missed the Oilers’ Stanley Cup dynasty and the retiring of Clarke’s number in Philadelphia.

Then one day while flipping channels in 1995, I landed on a TOR/PHI game and called my father to razz him. I don’t recall who won that game, but my passion for the sport was rekindled with a flamethrower, and since then, if there’s a game on, I’ll watch it.

Playoffs are the worst. I get so stressed out that I’m practically fetal by the end of a game, and the deeper my team gets is directly related to how shredded my nerves are. The Philly/Boston series three years ago nearly killed me. The Flyers were down 3-0 in the best of seven and had given up three goals in Game 4. By some miracle (due no doubt to my savaging of the Universe between periods), they clawed their way back to win the game, the series and the eastern conference final, but the effort drained them and they couldn’t beat Chicago for the Cup. &*^%$

Their series against Pittsburgh last year was a literal riot, rife with goals and penalty minutes. It was truly wild fun, and they won that round, but blew it to New Jersey in the conference semi-final. ^$#%*

They haven’t been the same since Mike Richards was traded to LA. And now that captain Chris Pronger looks like he’s done for good, there’s nothing holding them together. This half-baked season was a nightmare that couldn’t have been saved if they’d had another 34 games. They have some truly talented forwards—I consistently lose Claude Giroux to someone else in the office hockey pool, &^$%#—but there’s not much on the blue line and whatever the heck Bryzgalov thinks is in his job description, it isn’t stopping the puck. Sigh.

The regular season isn’t over until Tuesday, but the Flyers were officially finished last week. So were the Oilers, so the 2013/14 Stanley Cup playoffs will be easier on my nerves (sort of), and on Ter’s. She spends a lot of time talking me off the ledge at this time of year despite being a passionate fan herself. Edmonton born, she’s all about the Oilers and sick at their 7 year non-playoff drought, but no one beats me for drama. I’ve got a hate-on for most of the eastern conference teams and don’t care for many in the west, either; not the ones who got to the playoffs this year, anyway. National pride carries some weight: when my first choice goes out, I will cheer a Canadian team to the final … I sure wish Winnipeg had made it.

Sigh.

We’ll see what my heart does in the first round. I really hate to do this, but in the long run, I may have to become a temporary V-V-V … Nope, can’t do it. Can’t become enough of a Canuck fan to hope they win the Cup. I really like Ryan Kesler, though. I’d be okay if he won it – and the way the rest of the team has played, if they do repeat the final with a better outcome, it will be by riding on his back.

He was once owned by Philadelphia. What the heck were they thinking?

Sigh.