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Hockey

Jungleland

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June 14, 2014
Hockey, Sports
4 Comments

IMG_3243

History is not kind to losers. History will not remember the 2013-’14 New York Rangers. The names of the Los Angeles Kings will be etched into the Stanley Cup ring, and eventually that ring, and those players’ names, will find their way into an eternal resting spot in the Hockey Hall of Fame. These Rangers will not have that luxury. There might arise a Wikipedia page detailing their abysmal start, the mid-season trade of a beloved captain and their improbable run to the Stanley Cup Finals, but that’s the best anyone can hope for now. Poetic justice means nothing on the ice, and even if these Rangers deserved to win the Stanley Cup, or at least to suffer a slower death than the five games they got against the Kings, they found themselves in this reality, in this dimension, with nothing but a stream of black-and-white ticker tape and the memories of a wild season to welcome them to obsolescence.

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Saint, Elsewhere

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May 12, 2014
Hockey, Sports
1 Comment
Courtesy of Yahoo! Sports

Courtesy of Yahoo! Sports

Like music, film and other leisurely activities, people often view sports as an escape from the mundane, a way of retaining what little creativity and spontaneity we have left from childhood. The most ardent sports fans truly treat the games they watch as heroic battles of life and death, although the overwhelming majority recognize the necessity to create a distinction between sport and life. We, the onlookers, use sports as the way out of reality, a way of succeeding and failing vicariously through people we’ve never met and whose personal lives we’ll never infiltrate, giggling stupidly when recounting an athlete’s greatest moments to his or her face, as if he wasn’t there, as if he wasn’t the one who did it. We only see those images; that’s what stays with us, courtesy of SportsCenter and size-90 font newspaper headlines. But what happens when the lives they lead bleed across the pages and into our collective subconscious, giving feeling to the emotionless robots who score, save, rebound and run for us?

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The Offseason Freeze, A Travelogue Through the NHL: January 22-24

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January 25, 2014
Hockey, Sports
1 Comment

Courtesy of the Associated Press

College football has been out of my life for two whole Saturdays – this is a problem.

As soon as the garnet and gold confetti littered college football’s high church and Jameis Winston gave his Joel Osteen-like devotional, the 2013 season died while taking the BCS to the depths of the history books with it. The NFL has provided some solace, but it’s season too shall end in ticker tape, trophies and a smattering of product placement. This is my sporting soul’s lull period. January to August is just a slow creep minimally sustained by ‘crootin and coaching carousel story lines. I will watch MLB’s Opening Day with mild fanfare, I’ll research college basketball teams at the last minute come March and the NBA Finals may captivate me, depending on whether or not Kanye West drops another album. Yet, none of this will fully satisfy me until next year’s kickoff in late August.

With that being said, I’ve decided to immerse myself in a sport to pass through the doldrums of the offseason. A sport which, quite frankly, I’ve avoided mostly due to the conditions necessary to facilitate a game. I’m talking about hockey.

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The Lord’s Prayer

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June 26, 2013
Hockey, Sports
2 Comments

The 2013 Stanley Cup Finals will be remembered for a variety of reasons: it was the first final in twenty years to feature at least three overtime games,  it was the first final since 1979 to feature two of the Original Six franchises and it included perhaps the most improbable Stanley Cup-winning comeback in NHL history, a 17-second burst of offense that began with the Blackhawks pulling their immovable force of a goalie, Corey Crawford, and ended with a rebounded shot from Dave Bolland.

Really, it was an alignment of all the things that make postseason hockey a seemingly different sport from regular season hockey, one which people are more willing to ingest as a result of the excitement and fervor with which each team plays its games. No one leaves anything on the ice during the playoffs, or at least that is what fans are led to believe, and when a team has already played a legendary first-round series, with a legendary game 7, it is hard to continue putting out the effort to defeat team after team in route to a championship.

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