{"id":277,"date":"2011-06-15T01:06:39","date_gmt":"2011-06-15T08:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.wordpress.com\/?p=277"},"modified":"2011-06-15T01:06:39","modified_gmt":"2011-06-15T08:06:39","slug":"canucks-fever-an-explanation-06152010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/?p=277","title":{"rendered":"Canucks Fever: An Explanation – [06\/15\/2011]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I\u2019ve received quite a few comments (not from this blog, but in my day to day life) about how odd it is that I seem to have so much invested in these playoffs. Those of you who know me well \u2013 which is definitely most of you \u2013 know that I am religiously anti-sports, I not only don\u2019t care, I am normally aggressively indifferent.<\/p>\n

Quite a few people have called me out on this, some in very cutting ways. I\u2019ve been called a hypocrite, accused of cheering for something I know nothing about, a traitor to the artistic cause.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that know nothing<\/strong> about the game. My hockey knowledge is limited strictly to what little I\u2019ve been able to pick up on the fly from the friends that I\u2019ve jumped on the bandwagon with. It\u2019s not about that for me, in fact, what it\u2019s about \u2013 what it\u2019s about stretches back a very long way. And I realised this as I was sitting at \u201cVancouver Pizza\u201d (formally known as Boston Pizza) with my best friend watching the game that would get us to the playoffs, and I\u2019ve not really talked about it since, but I think those people dear to me who are calling me a hypocrite deserve an explanation\u2026<\/p>\n

So, for what it\u2019s worth\u2026<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t discover I had a small affinity for basketball until well into high school\u2026before that though\u2026<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re the kid who was too slow for track (with one great exception in grade 6), too weak for baseball (\u201ceveryone move in, what\u2019s the matter shorty! Can\u2019t ya hit!\u201d), too tiny for hockey (though we didn\u2019t have a hockey team),\u00a0 when you were even picked last for dodgeball<\/em>\u2026you convince yourself, even if you do it without thinking about it, that you don\u2019t need sports. You don\u2019t need to be on a team, or part of the cheerleaders (who wants to wear a stupid skirt like that anyway?! where’s the “intellectual thrill of spelling out words with your arms” as Buffy would say), you don\u2019t need<\/em> to play\u2026you can read instead, after all you don\u2019t need friends, when you can slay dragons.<\/p>\n

What does all that have to do with this series? More than you’d think. This is the first time in my life I\u2019ve allowed myself to enjoy anything sports-related, the first time I\u2019ve had friends who welcome me into the fold to enjoy it with them, and it doesn\u2019t matter one bit that we know next to nothing about the game, it doesn\u2019t matter that I still don\u2019t agree with how much the players get paid or any of the off-ice politics. None of that matters\u2026what matters is that the little girl who was picked last for dodgeball has a team that picked her.<\/p>\n

In the long run? It\u2019s not the team that\u2019s on the ice that matters to me \u2013 though don\u2019t get me wrong, I do want the \u2018Nucks to win \u2013 it\u2019s the team that\u2019s around the table, with a plate of nachos in the middle, it\u2019s the team that\u2019s sending me text updates on the score because they know I can\u2019t watch the game at work, or commiserating with me over the phone while I\u2019m watching at home because I don\u2019t dare brave the bus system\u2026<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that team that counts.<\/p>\n

And to hell with being picked last for dodgeball.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve received quite a few comments (not from this blog, but in my day to day life) about how odd it is that I seem to have so much invested in these playoffs. Those of you who know me well … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-vacation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3GtNE-4t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bloodinyoursaltwater.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}