Learning to Love Hockey

“If you hear me yelling, don’t worry—it’s just the Leafs,” my friend Melissa told me as we stood in the kitchen of our college apartment in New York City.

“Oh, are they playing tonight? Can I watch with you while I do my work?” I asked her.

“Sure!”

Some variation of this scene played out many times during our senior year of college. We’d stretch out in front of her computer monitor and watch a slightly sketchy LeafsTV feed, Melissa riveted to the game while I intermittently read or made outlines for my papers. Hockey was exciting, sometimes, when I could understand it, and cozy, a way to spend time with a friend and make homework a little more bearable.

I came to have a fondness for hockey, which was completely new to me. A bookish nerd who grew up thinking sports were for gross boys and dumb jocks, I’d never really understood what sports fandom was all about. Despite living in Massachusetts when the Red Sox broke their curse and when the Bruins won their first Cup in 39 years, sports had never really clicked for me.

Having a good friend with a stake in the success of a sports team I’d literally never heard of before meeting her—the Leafs don’t get a lot of airtime in the United States—was a totally new, and confusing, experience. What’s the appropriate response to an excited monologue about James Reimer? Was Randy Carlyle really worth that many curse words? How do you advise someone on whether or not they should buy a Kessel jersey when you’ve just barely learned who Kessel is? I no longer thought sports were stupid, but I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever feel about any sport the way Melissa felt about the Leafs.

Then the Leafs made the playoffs for the first time in nine years. I missed most of the games, but on May 13th, I was finally at home during a playoff game and was excited to see what playoff hockey was like. Melissa warned me that because it was a game seven, she’d be more tense than usual, but things weren’t so bad during the first two periods. The Leafs kept scoring, and the Bruins kept not-scoring, and I got a little more excited. Maybe I would get to witness history, and more playoffs!

But then, of course, the Bruins scored. And scored. And scored. When they tied it up at the end of the third period, Melissa kicked me out of her room. “I have to go through this alone,” she said. I was confused and worried—how did she know the Leafs wouldn’t win it in overtime? I opened the NHL website on my computer and stared at the Leafs-Bruins box score. “Please win, please win, please win,” I begged the Leafs. They didn’t listen. I loitered in the kitchen, waiting for Melissa to emerge. When she did, I gave her a bear hug, the kind of hug you reserve for when a friend gets really bad news.

The next day, she sent me this Down Goes Brown article. As I read it, something finally clicked for me, and I finally understood what it meant to be a sports fan. The highs, the lows, and why Game 7 was so heartbreaking. Ever since then, I’ve gotten more and more into hockey, completely abandoning my former stance on sports. And, for reasons passing understanding, the team I fell for was the Leafs.

I saw them at their worst, so I was prepared (or as prepared as you can be) for losing streaks and terrible collapses, but I wasn’t prepared for incredible goaltending or Kessel streaking up the ice or Rielly and Gardiner showing their brilliance. Now I have excited monologues about Reimer and curse words for Carlyle and internal debates about buying a Kessel jersey of my own. People in my workplace know me as “the girl that’s really into hockey.” And I do my best to explain to them, if they’ll listen, why hockey is something that deserves another look.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons why hockey isn’t especially big in the US. But when we talk about growing hockey’s fanbase or expanding the NHL’s TV audience, what we often forget is that it doesn’t take an entire hockey-mad culture or a fandom passed down through generations to turn someone into a hockey fan. You don’t even need to live in a city with a hockey team. Sometimes, all you need in order to learn to love hockey is a friend who’s willing to show you how awesome it is.