"ITS NOT A JERSEY. ITS PAINTED ON WITH PERMANENT MARKER"
Posted by Jason Fri, 30 Jun 2006 14:50:00 GMT
Being a loyal fan of any sports team is not good for your heart. Every year, you’re pulling for your team to win it, and most years your team fails. Most of the time, failure is easy to live with. You can usually see it coming from miles away, even if you are supporting them the entire time. But the rewards of being a hardcore fan come when your team does something special.
If you don’t know, I am a hardcore Oilers fan. I was wearing either an Oilers jersey or an Oilers tshirt on gameday for most of the regular season and all of the playoffs. Beek is like a cartoon. homer alwys has white shirt sleeve shirt and blue pants, and beek always has oilers jersey. That’s tough for an antisocial person like me… I had to enter into some awkward conversations with strangers (because after you agree that the Oilers rule, what else do you say to some random doogs). I gave Oilers updates to my morning bus driver. I even got booed on the street once! You know I was in my basement watching all the regular season games on Sportsnet. You know if it weren’t Jay Dee’s death, the oil drop would still be my profile picture here on Xanga.
If you didn’t know, the Oilers went on an incredible Stanley Cup run this year. And like every hardcore Oiler fan, I let it consume me for the past two months. It wasn’t just the aforementioned apparel. There were superstitions. I know that superstitions amongst fans are highly illogical, but it gets me into the team that much more. It makes me think I’m contributing. Usually, I know that it’s all just worthless ritual. But I can’t lie, once the Oilers got to the Conference Finals, I started taking my superstitions very seriously. I was rocking the playoff beard. I had to have the volume of my TV set to 44 during the game. The bus stop I got off at mattered. I had to be wearing the correct jersey. If and what I ate during the game was important. I even stapled a shoelace to a bulletin board at work in the name of superstition! (NOTE: we beat Anaheim with that string stapled up there.)
Watching the series was pretty much standard fare. Yelling and groaning at the TV when something bad was happening. Feeling nervous or nauseous the whole time (especially with a two goal lead). Silently celebrating during the good times and pacing around during the bad. Laughing at Bob Cole’s and Harry Neale’s hilarious senility-induced mistakes. The only crazy thing was when I had my head in my pillow admitting defeat as the puck bounced off Roli’s blocker down to Samsonov to turn around the San Jose series.
Game Seven of the finals was different though. I had a bad feeling all day. I had some questions over which of my superstitions would yield a win, and I wasn’t sure if I was right. Non-experts weren’t expecting the Canes to bounce back, but Don Cherry predicted a Carolina win1. It just wasn’t adding up, and I could tell from the Oilers play in third that it wasn’t going to add up to a win. I kept hope up until the end, but it didn’t happen.
It was like a knife through the heart. There’s always heartbreak in sports, but this was a little different. When your team does something special, but still comes up short, it’s a million times more painful. If they had lost to Detroit, I would have been happy that we at least made it to the playoffs. If they had been swept by San Jose, then at least we beat Detroit. If we had lost Anaheim, then hey it was a good run. If we had been swept by Carolina, then it’s just some bad luck since we lost Roli – that’s hockey sometimes. But making the comeback to take it to Game Seven made us feel like a team of destiny. To lose that game and just come short of fullfilling that destiny was the most painful way to lose.
The ride was certainly fun. And in its own way, the low feeling caused by the loss is a reward of its own. The full feeling of being a hardcore fan includes the lows as the highs. But if I had the option of making the same run next year, I’d definitely say no. Coming this close to the Cup is still a failure, and I’d take a miniscule chance of winning over a guarantee of coming close.
Since failure is usually inevitable, us hardcore fans take some joy in smaller victories against our archrivals. So even though we lost it all, it was still a better Cup run than Calgary’s in 2004. Tougher odds, more comebacks, better games, better fans… You know it’s true. It’s loser talk, but we need something.
1 In a playoff game involving a Canadian team, if Don Cherry doesn’t make a prediction before the game, he’s predicting the Amercian team will win.
