Meme with a Mission and Message
What it Means to be One of the Most Popular NHL GIFs
I’m a meme.
Literally.
It’s not something I planned. It’s not something that was part of a strategy. But it happened.
I’m a meme.
It was the fall of 2019 and it was time for pre-season games. The 2019–2020 hockey season was getting underway.
One morning, a simple post on Facebook asked: “Reply below with a GIF describing how you feel about hockey season starting.”
I didn’t know about the post right away. It wasn’t in my feed. It wasn’t someone I knew. I found out, because a friend tagged me. She was replying, the pointing finger emoji indicating the prior comment, “Um, Cathy. Is that YOU?”
Just above that pointer, a gif that showed a familiar gold hood, Vegas Golden Knights hockey sweater; gold and black pom poms in motion.
Yep. That was me.
The watermarks showed it to be an official GIF of the NHL, taken off an NBC sports network feed from the playoffs the prior spring.
Needless to say I was tickled pink.
It became my go-to GIF response whenever excited about something. And I wasn’t alone. Over the last several years, tags on pretty much all social networks from friends who were sent the GIF or noticed it and tagged me. Messages that would come in from friends who’d been sent the GIF by someone else who didn’t know me. Seeing it show up randomly on line.
The GIF that keeps on giving.
At this writing it’s been giving nearly 40 million times.
Wow. So that feels pretty damn good. It’s the #1 result for “Golden Knights Fan” or “Vegas Knights Fan” and interesting comes up under “ice hockey dancing” too … which is apparently a thing.
It seems that no matter what game I attend — in Vegas or away — no matter where I sit in the arena, on more occasions than not at some point the cameras catch me. Me and my pom poms beamed up to the jumbotron and occasionally ending up on some network feed.
There was the night I was out to dinner and got a message from a friend asking if I was enjoying the game. When I said I wasn’t there, they replied that I’d been included in some video footage on TV before the game began.
The night of the game 5 win, when the Vegas Golden Knights snared the Stanley Cup, I was profiled on a local news station. I’d already left town by the time the parade happened, but somehow I made it into the coverage pre-roll.
Over the last six months as I’ve been diving deeply into the next chapter of my work and life, I started to think about it.
What was it about me that is out of the ordinary or worthy of attention?
I’m not one of those fans who paints their face or dresses particularly outrageous — at least not by Vegas standards. I’m not always clad in gold and VGK gear. My home isn’t a shrine to the team. I can’t quote the stats of every player or even tell you every single nuanced rule of the game.
And then it hit me.
This GIF represents everything that hockey means to me. To me, hockey isn’t just about the stats and numbers. To me, hockey isn’t about even winning the Cup (though of course that is delightful). To me, hockey and particularly the Vegas Golden Knights, represent something much bigger.
It’s about joy. It’s about facing the elegant brutality of life, standing in the face of conflict and discord and in the end finding a common goal, a common space. It’s about the ability of human beings to be in direct conflict and disagreement in one moment, and then because ultimately there is a common goal, disparate views can come together.
When the Knights had their utterly remarkable and unheard of inaugural season, it would have been a perfect Cinderella story to snare the cup that year. It was never about that.
We were a City broken. Shredded, really. A monstrous act of domestic terrorism at a music festival on October 1, 2017 — merely days before the Knights would take to the ice for their first home game of their first season.
A City that never had a center, never had a team or thing that was especially ours. A City that wrestles with the “what happens in Vegas…” image of debauchery, so many who believe it isn’t a place to live but to party. A City that has spent its history being everything to everyone else — catering to visitors with a level of hospitality and service unmatched in most places. A City that was suddenly devastated, and suddenly given a Golden beacon of hope.
And then the Vegas Golden Knights kept winning.
The story of what this means and the experience isn’t just mine. This superb commentary by Vegas local TV talent Logan Reever nails it.
I’m going to fast forward through the last five years as they’ve had improbable runs in pretty much every year — year 5 being the only time in their tender years of existence when they didn’t make the playoffs at all.
Just how was it possible to bring the most improbable cross section of people together, to create from a fractured and splintered group, a community that holds together — not just in spite of the differences, but in many ways because of them?
For that, one need only look to the team itself. A collection of misfits, cast-offs from other teams that neglected to “protect” them during the 2017 expansion draft. Players who were essentially told by their prior teams — if we need to lose someone, we can lose you.
Over the years the roster has changed, but six of those original Golden Misfits remain. At Game 5, the coach put five of them on the ice. The only reason all six weren’t there is because none of them play goal.
What I’ve found through my love of this team, which has taken me to arenas around the country, is that by putting the love of hockey first, it’s an easy step to connect with others. Are there some fans for other teams who are a bit overly salty and don’t understand the difference between playful chirping and just being rude? Sure. They are the exception not the rule.
When I went to Florida for Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Finals this year, I reached out to a women’s fan group for the Florida Panthers. One of the women not only supported me in finding a ticket to the game, she invited me to a pre-game tailgate and introduced me to a bunch of other fans.
One of my first text messages after the Golden Knights won the Stanley Cup, was congratulations from her.
It’s a game.
A brutal and intense one, for sure and yes winning feels better than not, but in the end it is a game. A game is a perfect mirror for the kind of brutal confrontation we are seeing more and more in the world these days.
Difference being, in ice hockey there’s honor, respect and a knowing that in the end we can line up to shake hands and respect each other.
There’s a lesson in there for all of us.
