The Hockey Sweater

I was reading an article the other day on espn.com about how godawful the Toronto Maple Leafs are right now and how they are the "most dysfunctional organization in professional sports." It made me pretty pissed about my most beloved and favorite team, and I felt like ranting. Some of my friends had started up blogs here on blogspot and decided "Hey, I enjoy ranting about alot of crap, most of it having to do with sports. Why not make a blog out of it?" If Bill Simmons of ESPN can earn a fortune writing columns consisting mostly of bitching about the Red Sox (you guys won two World Series in 4 seasons, shut the fuck up), discussing his gambling trips to Vegas, and making random references to Entourage, then I should be able to write a blog. Of course I'll discuss things other than sports, but this isn't gonna turn into some stupid livejournal "Wah wah, I'm emo and I hate my life" crap.

First I'm going to debunk a mystery that alot of people seem to wonder about, and that is why do i love hockey so much. Roch Carrier sums it up best in his Canadian children's literary classic The Hockey Sweater:

"The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places-the school, the church and the skating rink-but our real life was on the skating rink."

Nothing defines growing up in Canada more than those winters spent out on the ice rink playing hockey. It's what I remember most fondly about growing up in Toronto. My Christmas breaks and weekends in the winter would consist spending most of the daylight hours playing hockey. And wouldn't matter if there were clear blue skies or gray with the freezing wind howling out of the north. We were out there. We fought our battles, settled our scores, and proved our mettle out on the ice rink. We pretended to be our heroes who wore the blue and white of the Toronto Maple Leafs and scoring that goal in triple overtime in game 7 of the Finals and finally returning the Stanley Cup to Toronto. Hockey and the Leafs defined my childhood and still form a big part of my identity, especially living and dying (mostly dying lately) with the fortunes of my team. And I'm still hoping these many years later to see the Leafs drink from the Cup. When will that day be? We shall see...