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Hockey Is Awesome
I don't follow hockey.
I don't really know the rules ("icing" and "offsides" have been explained to me a few different times, and I'm just starting to get it because I've been watching so much of the playoffs. Somehow they just won't stick in my brain. It's like card games. God help anyone who ever tries to teach me bridge. Annie Sullivan had it easier), so it makes it harder to watch. But I love the playoffs (more so now, since "my" Minnesota Wild beat the Avalanche and I get at least four more games).
It started when I was in college, I forget exactly which year but it must have been '97 or '98, when Edmonton played Dallas in the first round. I hated Dallas, because they moved away from Minnesota, and even though I didn't know hockey I was a sports fan and that's what you do (I should hate the Lakers, then, by all rights, but that was way before I was born. Although I don't particularly care for the Lakers. Anyway, back to the column). It was the first hockey series of my lifetime in which I had any sort of vested interest (I was not in full bloom as an obsessive four-sport fan when the North Stars played the Penguins for the Cup a few years earlier, and couldn't have watched the series anyway because we were on a family vacation in Europe, which I tell at the risk of grossly distorting your perception of how I grew up -- I've left the United States twice, and once was Ontario -- but it's information that I feel is necessary to explain why I missed watching a Minnesota team playing in a championship final. We did get the scores from the paper every day), and I really wanted Dallas to lose.
Game 7 ended up going to overtime, and by this point I really, really cared about who won. When the Oilers scored, it was then that I fell in love with playoff hockey. I don't know what it is; I think because hockey is the only major sport where you can't go from leading to trailing -- or, obviously, from trailing to leading -- in one fell swoop, each goal is a lot more important. You've got to get that lead, and if you do you know you're cool at least until they tie it back up. But you don't want them to tie it back up, because absolutely ANYTHING can happen in sudden death overtime, and you want to avoid that if possible.
Hockey is still not my favorite sport; I'm with Deion Sanders (on this and, I would imagine, only this), who said, "Baseball's my wife, but football's my girlfriend." And, like the NBA, the regular season isn't very relevant because half the teams make the playoffs. But come playoff time, you can bet I'm glued to the TV to see who wins the Cup (and the NBA title, for that matter, though I don't follow the league terribly closely).
Not that this is a revelation or anything; everybody knows how great the Stanley Cup playoffs are. What's fun for me is that fact that while I'm a lifelong sports fan, I'm just now discovering what everybody (and by "everybody," I mean "people who talk about hockey") has been talking about. It would be like being a huge music buff and then hearing about Bob Dylan for the first time when you're 22.
And, I've got a vacation from work coming up, so I'll be watching lots and lots and LOTS of post-season hockey and basketball. Are there three sweeter non-sexual words in the English language than "sweatpants," "recliner" and "playoffs?"
I would argue that there are not.
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