OMG Hockey
Today's hockey match was incredible, and I can only think of one other sports game I've watched that was quite like it.
Context is everything, so I'll begin at the beginning. I grew up with almost no interest in team sports at all. My parents weren't that into spectator sports, and I was the kid who enjoyed playing alone in primary school, so I never caught the bug from my peers. By the time I started a new school at age 7, football(*) was this mysterious thing that some of my peers knew all about and were obsessed with, and I found completely alien. I did get into playing rugby-I think it helped that we were all beginners together, because making 6-year-olds play rugby is such an obviously bad idea-but still wasn't interested in watching it.
Around the start of university, I started to get interested in watching football. I learned that watching a game on TV is actually fun if I do it in a bar with a lot of people who care who wins, and I had fun going to a couple of matches with friends who were fans of one club or another (Watford, Gillingham, Crystal Palace). I had started to like it, but hadn't really got the bug, until early summer of 1999.
I had just taken the last exam of my BA, and because we didn't have many optional classes it was a lot of peoples' last exam. It had also been one of the most difficult exams from the whole course, and a large group of us went to the pub together to celebrate, commiserate and unwind. Trouble was - people kept insisting on going through postmortems of the questions and what they should have written, and so on and so on. I and one other person had been considering leaving campus and heading into town to get away from this, but we were reluctant because there was a big game on, and at such times it's damn near impossible to find a pub in Brighton that hasn't been taken over by loud sports fans, for which we were not in the mood.
Eventually, we got so fed up that we just decided to brave it, and went to the Cricketers in the vain hope that it was too much of an old man pub to show the game. We arrived to find the Champions' League final on the TV and not going very well - Manchester United were 1-0 down to Bayern Munich. [The thing to understand here is that most British football fans love to hate Man U, except when they are playing against a German team, at which point jingoism trumps all.] We watched a whole second half in which Man U just couldn't score, and then 3 minutes of injury time was announced. In those three minutes, Man U pulled everything out and somehow managed to score twice, winning the tournament, and I became a football fan.
Fast forward a few years: since moving to the US I've been interested in hockey. It's the local sport that makes the most sense to me; like football but faster and that much more physical, but I've never lived anywhere with an NHL team, and Seattle doesn't even really have a team any more (they play in Kent, which might as well be the moon in terms of being my local team). I apparently underestimated how much Melinda was into hockey, and never really had any other hockey fans around me, so it stayed something I liked watching from time to time but wasn't that into.
Then we got tickets for the womens' bronze medal match in the Olympics, which was great (also the first full hockey stadium I've been to, so it actually had atmosphere), and watched both the games Canada had while we were in Vancouver in full bars (women beating USA for the gold medal; men beating Russia in the quarter-final; both teams playing in a way that made it hard to imagine them ever losing). I was becoming a fan, and Melinda and I had decided to start watching NHL games-I think I'm going to be a Redwings fan by default because the nearest good team is across a border-but it was really today's game that sealed it.
Canada vs USA, in the Olympic final, and just like 1999 I arrived late. We heard Canada's first goal as we were locking up our bikes, and then watched a hard-fought second period in which both teams scored once. In the third period Canada seemed able to just shut the US out enough to have sealed victory, so with a few minutes remaining the US substituted an attacking player for their goalie (there's no injury time in hockey, so they knew exactly how much play was left). Canada doing exactly this when 3-4 down a week ago let the US score their fifth goal and seal the game, but this time the gamble worked - team USA scored with so little time left on the clock that Canada couldn't counter-attack. The game went to a sudden-death [officially: sudden-victory - dunno if that's Canadian or Olympic niceness showing] segment made extra manic by taking a player out of each team.
The team that almost everyone in the pub wanted to win lost this time, but just like in 1999 this game has made me a fan. I wonder how many other people it did that to.
Context is everything, so I'll begin at the beginning. I grew up with almost no interest in team sports at all. My parents weren't that into spectator sports, and I was the kid who enjoyed playing alone in primary school, so I never caught the bug from my peers. By the time I started a new school at age 7, football(*) was this mysterious thing that some of my peers knew all about and were obsessed with, and I found completely alien. I did get into playing rugby-I think it helped that we were all beginners together, because making 6-year-olds play rugby is such an obviously bad idea-but still wasn't interested in watching it.
Around the start of university, I started to get interested in watching football. I learned that watching a game on TV is actually fun if I do it in a bar with a lot of people who care who wins, and I had fun going to a couple of matches with friends who were fans of one club or another (Watford, Gillingham, Crystal Palace). I had started to like it, but hadn't really got the bug, until early summer of 1999.
I had just taken the last exam of my BA, and because we didn't have many optional classes it was a lot of peoples' last exam. It had also been one of the most difficult exams from the whole course, and a large group of us went to the pub together to celebrate, commiserate and unwind. Trouble was - people kept insisting on going through postmortems of the questions and what they should have written, and so on and so on. I and one other person had been considering leaving campus and heading into town to get away from this, but we were reluctant because there was a big game on, and at such times it's damn near impossible to find a pub in Brighton that hasn't been taken over by loud sports fans, for which we were not in the mood.
Eventually, we got so fed up that we just decided to brave it, and went to the Cricketers in the vain hope that it was too much of an old man pub to show the game. We arrived to find the Champions' League final on the TV and not going very well - Manchester United were 1-0 down to Bayern Munich. [The thing to understand here is that most British football fans love to hate Man U, except when they are playing against a German team, at which point jingoism trumps all.] We watched a whole second half in which Man U just couldn't score, and then 3 minutes of injury time was announced. In those three minutes, Man U pulled everything out and somehow managed to score twice, winning the tournament, and I became a football fan.
Fast forward a few years: since moving to the US I've been interested in hockey. It's the local sport that makes the most sense to me; like football but faster and that much more physical, but I've never lived anywhere with an NHL team, and Seattle doesn't even really have a team any more (they play in Kent, which might as well be the moon in terms of being my local team). I apparently underestimated how much Melinda was into hockey, and never really had any other hockey fans around me, so it stayed something I liked watching from time to time but wasn't that into.
Then we got tickets for the womens' bronze medal match in the Olympics, which was great (also the first full hockey stadium I've been to, so it actually had atmosphere), and watched both the games Canada had while we were in Vancouver in full bars (women beating USA for the gold medal; men beating Russia in the quarter-final; both teams playing in a way that made it hard to imagine them ever losing). I was becoming a fan, and Melinda and I had decided to start watching NHL games-I think I'm going to be a Redwings fan by default because the nearest good team is across a border-but it was really today's game that sealed it.
Canada vs USA, in the Olympic final, and just like 1999 I arrived late. We heard Canada's first goal as we were locking up our bikes, and then watched a hard-fought second period in which both teams scored once. In the third period Canada seemed able to just shut the US out enough to have sealed victory, so with a few minutes remaining the US substituted an attacking player for their goalie (there's no injury time in hockey, so they knew exactly how much play was left). Canada doing exactly this when 3-4 down a week ago let the US score their fifth goal and seal the game, but this time the gamble worked - team USA scored with so little time left on the clock that Canada couldn't counter-attack. The game went to a sudden-death [officially: sudden-victory - dunno if that's Canadian or Olympic niceness showing] segment made extra manic by taking a player out of each team.
The team that almost everyone in the pub wanted to win lost this time, but just like in 1999 this game has made me a fan. I wonder how many other people it did that to.