The hockey gods must be crazy

Igot to be a hockey fan the way many people do: jumping on a bandwagon. The year was 2011, and the Vancouver Canucks were the best team in the NHL, having dominated in the regular season and run away with the President’s Trophy.

I was living in Toronto at the time, and (predictably) the Leafs didn’t even make the playoffs that year.

Yet this Canadian team out west was tearing up the standings. Bars in my neighbourhood were full of fairweather Canucks fans. I became one myself.

Walking the streets of Toronto that spring, you would think you were actually in Vancouver, with all the blue and green sweaters about. The daily temperatures were very agreeable, as though all us fair-weather fans had somehow made the weather itself more like Vancouver’s.

Of course, the Canucks’ sunny Cup run that year ended in stormy disaster. The team lost in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup Final to Boston and the famous Vancouver riots ensued.

A year or so later, I moved to the province of Quebec. And thanks to my previous bandwagon experience— and thus my cultivated hatred of the Boston Bruins—becoming a Montreal Canadiens fan seemed like a natural next step.

Of course, in becoming a Habs fan back then, I wasn’t exactly jumping on any bandwagons. Not that the Canadiens were a terrible team. In 2014, for example, they made a respectably deep run in the playoffs.

But since that time… not much to write home about. Until this year of course (but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves).

Despite the Habs’ poor record these past few years, I have elevated my fandom all out of proportion. No mere fair-weather fan am I.

I don’t just tune in for the playoffs. I follow the entire, absurdly long 82game season. Whether they’re winning or losing. (Especially if they’re losing.)

I sacrifice sleep to watch road games out west. I tune in to the intellectual blackhole of sports radio. I listen to all that boneheaded, between-game analysis like it actually matters.

Why do I do these things? Why does anyone invest themselves emotionally in a sports team? Only one team wins a Stanley Cup each year. That means 30 other fan bases are left disappointed. That’s not very good odds.

Even if your team wins the Cup, the victory is short-lived. In the off-season, your favourite players get traded away (typically because of contracts and money, as though these players aren’t rich enough already).

In the fall, your depleted team limps back onto the ice and the whole crazy process starts all over again.

But the moment your team hoists the Cup, that’s worth all the anguish, right? Some would say yes. Truly longsuffering Habs fans will talk about 1993—the last time the Habs won—with the kind of nostalgia usually reserved for memories of first love.

You would think that the Habs’ miraculous playoff run this year has been a source of incandescent pleasure for fans like me. Yet my anxiety over this team has never be higher.

Each time they won a round, I was happy, sure. But in the back of my mind was the nagging awareness that defeat might still loom.

Unless they win the whole darned thing, of course. Which is the only outcome that can possibly scratch the sports fan’s itch.

In 2011, a friend of mine who grew up in Vancouver—and was not just a bandwagon Canucks fan like me—did not seem to be enjoying her beloved team’s playoff run very much at all.

In fact, she looked miserable. She could barely watch a game. She shut herself in her apartment whenever they played and forced herself not to check the score.

“You have no idea,” she told me gravely, “how long we’ve been waiting for this.” The Canucks had never won a Cup, and they didn’t that year either. After that calamitous game seven, my friend, who is Jewish, joked that she would now be sitting shiva. (Or maybe she wasn’t joking?)

As I write these reflections, the Canadiens have lost three straight games to the despised Tampa Bay Lightning. Things are *not* looking good. Yet they were also down against

Toronto and seemed defeated then. They bounced back and won. Hope tortures eternal.

Of course, as you read this, on a Tuesday morning, the Canadiens may have already been swept and the whole accursed playoffs might be over.

In that case, if you want me, I’ll be home sitting shiva. Or at least until next season begins.