Hockey Season

There a lot of things I would do different if I was to live my life over, and one of them would be to get less obsessed by the NHL. I've toned 'er down some over the years, but I'm still fairly obsessed with the Canucks. It's totally irrational. I mean, if I met some guy on the street who happened to be good at hockey, I wouldn't particularly care. But for some reason, you group 'em all together and pay them a lot of money to feign allegiance to my city, and I live or die by it. It's embarrassing, really, but I can't help it.

I used to fairly strongly believe that people who were not into their hometown team were revealing a character deficiency. Like, the guy who was born and raised in Vancouver but is a Bruins fan, or whatever. If there's some sort of reason, maybe his old man was from Boston, or the star player is from his hometown, I guess it's okay. But just to randomly choose to not cheer for your home team, for no reason? That aint right. I still sorta think so. But I think caring as much as I do about any professional sports team shows a bigger deficiency: you gotta be kinda dumb.

If I was dumb like that, this would just have been preamble to the fact that the season opened tonight. I couldn't watch, being preoccupied as I was with playing a rock show in Bend, Oregon. But judging by the box score, we stumbled badly out of the gate, falling behind 3-0 and 4-1, before launching an intense comeback attempt. Got 'er back to 4-3 (with an insane third period shots advantage) before surrendering the empty-netter. Honestly, I think it bodes pretty well that when it's 3-0 it's not over. We're supposed to be pretty good this year. Some experts even predicting a Cup run. Not that I give a fuck.