From today’s b, the paper.

In a town that is woefully devoid of hockey love (and has chased its share of minor league hockey franchises away over the years), I’m once again in danger of catching Stanley Cup Fever.

After loving hockey in my youth and covering the Skipjacks and Capitals in a previous life in the 1980s, I have come to grips with the realities of hockey. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who love hockey and those who laugh at hockey.

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Slapshot” — a cult classic for any sports fan — you know that hockey is the one sport (and pro wrestling is not a sport) that can laugh at itself a bit. Hockey has a sense of humor. The Canadian accents. The fights. The excitement of the score and the horn and buzzers going off. Yet when it comes to the chase for Lord Stanley’s goblet, it’s no laughing matter.

Hockey fans take the Cup — the one prize in sport that never changes (there’s only one Cup!) — and the chase for it during April and May quite seriously. The games began in earnest last week. This year, we’ve got some “old-time hockey.” Devils vs. Rangers. Boston vs. Montreal.
And here in these parts, if you have any hockey fan in you at all, you’ve gotta love a Capitals-Flyers seven-game war to start the playoffs. These two franchises battled through the late 1980s every April it seemed. It was Ali-Frazier on ice in some of their classic battles.

I suppose this is the time of the year that I have to explain to the rest of the world just why the hockey playoffs stand out. Year in and year out, the Stanley Cup playoff chase is the best tournament in the world of sports. Why?

The first thing is how much it matters to the players. While it’s easy to see baseball players or NBA players look like they’re going at half speed, I assure you that you don’t need to know much about the game on ice to appreciate the intensity once the playoffs begin. Put a game on this week and you’ll see the speed, action, grace and will of the players, and you might fall in love with hockey, too.

The one knock on hockey for much of my lifetime has been that it’s a “bad TV sport.” The puck is too small. The game is too fast. No one understand “offsides” or some of the more esoteric rules. But, with the advent of high definition television, I almost like watching the games at home more than being there. That is, when you can actually find the games in the evenings now that ESPN has dumped the league from its radar as a “major sport.”

Of course, being there costs a lot more. Hockey for all of its positive attributes is just too expensive, if you ask me. And I love it. And I think it’s worth my time. But I’m not sure if rinkside seats are worth in excess of $100. So, I’ll be on my couch, watching the ebb and flow of the games. There will inevitably be overtimes, and big goals, and a few fights (not so many in the playoffs, to be honest).

It’s just nice to know as a sports fan that there’s still one tournament left with some integrity, some grit and some real deep-seated love of the game and the thrill of the traditional skate around the arena holding the Stanley Cup and having your name forever engraved upon it. And if you’re a player and win the Stanley Cup, you get to take the Cup for a day to your hometown and parade it around and have a picnic with friends and family.

Old school game. Old school traditions. As the NHL once said in its marketing campaign, “Game On!”

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.