Monday, April 27, 2015

Finding Joy in Lost Days and Nights



By now, you and I have lost 12 nights or full days to the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Not that I am complaining, but things quickly become important the more you push them into the background.

Parents' birthdays, Easter, the opening weeks of baseball season? All gone. My team did not make the playoffs, so I have nothing but time on my hands to enjoy the games, and I have watched all but 3 of the 44 playoff games so far. I have been frustrated by none of them.

No late night walks with Jax the Lucky Dog to either wind down from a big Kings victory or soothe my frayed nerves after a crushing Kings loss. (Note, little Petunia Puck does not do walks late at night. She barely does hockey, and never a post-game walk.) No matter, the Kings did not win, did not get in. Done and done. I have dealt with it and accept the failing grade. Must do better next season.

So, having said that, I consider this spring to be the big wind down from the season, and I am loving every minute of it. (Having had a miserable close to the ninth grade, I spent that late spring of 1976 watching the Habs crush the Flyers to win the Cup. Then I slept late all that summer, got up in time to play a lot of road hockey, tennis, Wiffle ball and baseball; ride my bike all over the earth; read great books from the college library that the junior high librarians said were smut; chase -- with a small sample size of success -- the girls of my small town; eat a ton burgers and fries; wash it all down with jugs of root beer; and have a summer worthy of a champion. I looked at the bitter side of life, flipped it over and found the sweet consolation prize.) I would have liked to see the Kings in the playoffs, but lessons learned over time have taught me to take my punishment and move on. There are always good things waiting for me.

And the first consolation prize I received this spring was watching the Vancouver Canucks once again choke on their own inflated sense of self.



No collapse in hockey brings about more joy in the Lounge, and the flowing of great whine in British Columbia, than the turfing of the Canucks. No sooner do the Canucks lose than writers like Ed Willes of The Province in Vancouver set up a comfy pile of excuses to ease the landing after the usual premature jackknife dive to conclude the postseason.

Don't want to read too far down? Well, here is the little nugget of sugar for a bitter lose, right at the end of the first page of the report on the web:

We’re not going to unload on the officiating here because they weren’t the reason the Canucks lost. No, we’re going to save that for later in the playoffs.

But consider this:

The issue isn’t that there’s a conspiracy against the Canucks or any other team that feels they’ve been jobbed by the zebras. The issue is the calls are so inconsistent, so random, so disconnected that any hockey fan can reasonably look at the games and conclude their team got the shaft.

I'm not going to say we were jobbed, because we are all getting jobbed by the referees, but we got jobbed by them more/less/etc. Yawn.

The loser's flow of sad rat's tears begin. I love it. Love the playoffs. The old Smythe Division rules. Just not the Canucks.

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