Keeping Score wrote:
After watching how this board reacts to the NHL, as well as the parade and everything else, I'm surprised at their contracts. I don't think the deals match the passion of the fans of hockey. Something is amiss there.
It's because NHL fandom is highly localized. The Blackhawks, Penguins, Red Wings, Flyers, and Sabres get unreal local ratings on national TV and their respective RSNs, but where there's no NHL team, there are no viewers. Sure, you'll get Milwaukee watching the Stanley Cup when the Hawks are playing, or West Palm Beach popping a big rating for the Olympics on the backs of NY/NJ/LI transplants, but put a Wings-Flyers game on NBC on a Sunday afternoon and no one gives a fuck in Kansas City or Houston or Cleveland. End result: no national value.
It's hard to be a hockey fan without a team. You can't be cosmopolitan about it and watch "for your fantasy team" like football and baseball, or "root for witnessing greatness" or whatever the fuck you're supposed to do with the NBA nowadays. And on top of that, love for your team and love for your home are virtually inextricable -- far more provincial than that of any sport, in my opinion. The media likes to talk a big game about how, say, the Bears "embody blue-collar Chicago" or some such bullshit, but I think there's really something to hockey fandom as civic-pride signifier that makes it something you can't wholly take on from afar. The way I see it, you're talking about a niche sport that obsesses heavily over its traditions, rituals, and community, all generally in places that fall a bit short of paradise. Once you're doing that, it's just a hop, skip, and jump to romanticizing even more hyper-specific stuff that most people can't get.
I pull for the Jets to do well, but without having lived in Winnipeg, how can I ever
really know what it means to be A Winnipeg Fan? I can't. I don't know what it's like to deal with -20F Januaries as a matter of course. I don't know what it's like to grow up in a slowly dying city surrounded by hundreds of miles of nothing. My uncles never told me about what it was like to watch a game from the hysterically steep upper deck of the old barn. I can't imagine how it felt to lose a team and get it back. Without having looked it up, I'd never have known that they call their alleys "backlanes" there. It's like showing up to someone else's family reunion.
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Molly Lambert wrote:
The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.
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