Hockey Fever

At my last bar job on game nights it was inevitable to watch the customer’s joy lessen as the night went on. At the end of it everyone would leave in a rush (these were usually the moments that the debit machine chose to go down) when the team lost, leaving no doubt to go home and finish their drinking alone with a bottle of something stronger and a little bit sad, say a plastic bottle of Russian Prince vodka.

I paid little attention to the games, to the point that when customers came in and asked me the score I was often caught off guard, having not noticed that there was in fact a game on. Though when I worked behind the bar I knew enough to dip out of the way of the TV, joking that day I would make someone the perfect wife.

Now as I attend games with my partner, a season ticket holder with more jerseys than I have shoes, I find myself having to try to feign interest about the game. Though it is truly embarrassing to ask if those are the Denver Broncos on the ice, only to have my partner tell me, his face in his hands that that’s an NFL team. I’ve never really felt dumb about anything before, and here I am realizing that reading Chuck Klosterman is not an answer to all things sports-related.

A couple of weeks ago I’d run into someone I knew from my bar days who was in the middle of being drug into a bathroom stall in the ladies’ room at the stadium by a woman I didn’t know. I’d joked about it weeks later when I’d seen him again, saying I didn’t recognize him when he wasn’t being drug into a bathroom stall and had raised my eyebrows suggestively.

“Oh, she’s a friend,” he’d told me, “We weren’t going in there to do that… actually yes, yes we were.” And it made me think that perhaps the whole stadium was on something, thousands of people drinking the Kool Aide while I loafed silently alongside them. And their energy to keep up cheering for a team that was constantly losing made sense all of a sudden.

Now I see someone on the street in a certain sweater or the ugly orange and blue scarf, and I find myself wondering if they will be my generation’s artefacts, if a couple of hundred years from now Gretzky’s fossilized jockstrap will stand in a museum next St. Stephen’s mummified hand and Andy Warhol’s wig collection.

As I watch the city work itself up into a fervor I feel like it’s high school all over again and I’m never going to fit among my peers. There are suddenly bets and middle-aged men in suits tussling in the streets. I think that I wish I understood, there’s something about that sort of faith in a sport that makes me a bit jealous. It’s like one long tailgate party that I feel I shouldn’t attend. Yet as I learn about cherry picking and hat tricks and who the most watched new player is I find myself trying to understand. I want to learn, even if it’s to come out looking better than the girl beside me wondering loudly when the other team got another goal.