Greasy Goals & Five-Holes, or My First Season as a Fan of Hockey

An essay

As someone who recently had a bash at sports writing, I can tell you it’s a deceptively difficult thing to do. To translate the emotions and energy of spectatorship to someone who doesn’t care for your team or your sport or even sport at all in a way that makes them drop their hesitations and get it is not easy. Nor is it easy to simultaneously keep the diehards interested while you have to do the necessary hand holding and bringing-up-to-speed for the casuals.

But Trilety (unsurprisingly, if you have been a longtime reader of her work like me) pulls this balancing act off spectacularly, as you are about to discover.

Enjoy.

~TJB.

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The organist slices the icy silence in a chord I can’t name but is audibly and iconically the first note of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Todd Angilly slides in with his slick of lubricious voice that lifts to boom in a matter of silky seconds, and an anthem that I have never cared about becomes a beloved tune because of the Boston Bruins’ official anthem singer. My body sways in a new looseness, all the loathing of my country’s jingoistic ways melts into a puddle of humble. Todd always hits the note, never a rasp or a crack. The only miss he’s made, the only shot not on goal, was when he false-started with the “Star Spangled Banner” at the moment he was supposed to belt out “O Canada.” And just after the end of the song is caught in the net of his vocal folds, he points to fans in the crowd and does an oscillating forearm move that is a blend of fist-pump and Guinness-pull. After each serenade, Todd tends bar in the TD Garden arena. My new appreciation for our nation’s anthem and my new affection for the cherubic Angilly, are just two of the many surprising side effects of my first year as a fan of hockey. 

For the past seven months, my body has been under the spell of a force previously unknown to me, compelling me to stand, to shout, to wail and curse. After eighty-plus games, I am reeling and spinning, a rod and reel of overwhelmed emotion. Maybe I should’ve been a spectator of sport fishing instead of hockey. Maybe it’s just the empathetic devastation I felt the morning after the Boston Bruins lost to the Florida Panthers in the 7th game of the 1st round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. My fanatic heart is. . . broken, fractured. But tissue and muscle can’t fracture like bone, so hearts don’t break like babyface Jake DeBrusk’s leg during the Winter Classic. Hearts tear, loudly, with a rip of pith and swish of skates making snow from ice. I am a heart-torn fan.

I’m not a sports fan.

I’m a hockey fan.

Most other sports bore me. . . football, baseball, basketball, soccer. But hockey is my spectacle. Jim says hockey is the sport for people who don’t like sports.

Hockey is my game.

I grew up around skaters. Punks. The fringe athletes. Even tho I was in high school in the early 90s, the social hierarchy of preps and punks from the 80s still spilled through the hallways, and I wasn’t in the cheerleader/football fold. Yet hockey feels like the skateboarding of sports, rougher, edgier, messier. More bone. More breaks. When the puck drops, the crack and slap of stick-to-stick and stick-to-ice sounds similar to the calming audio from my youth of skateboard wheels and trucks. The soundtrack of motion and agility. The sound of freedom and takedowns. And the sound of the Misfits piped into the stadium during hockey games makes me feel even more at home with this sport.

Last year, just before the final seven games of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Jim held the remote in his anticipatory hand and said, “I haven’t watched hockey in years. Wanna watch the playoffs with me?” One hockey game in, and I was hooked. As the Avs took the cup in 2022, I excitedly told Jim, “Okay, I’m going to choose a team and follow them during the next hockey season!”

Never having been a fan of any team, or much of anything before, I had no idea that my naïve joy of watching two teams I had no affinity for battle it out for the Cup in 2022 was an entirely different experience than watching a team I love be brutalized in the same battle in 2023. Last year, I was just watching, with a detached joy. But this year, I’m caught and connected, a part of the pile-up, I’m not just a hockey fan – I’m a Bruins fan.

My scouting began earnestly in autumn of 2022 as we watched as many games as possible so I could choose my team. Which team would garner what would become my obsessive attention for the rest of the season? Like a boyfriend-hungry girl on the first week of school, hunting the halls with the scent of blood in her nose, sniffing the spilled oil of a rough boy in need of a soft touch.

I was thrilled by Charlie McAvoy’s bruiser status.

I was impressed by the arachnid agility of Jeremy Swayman in the net.

The Bruins were it.

“The Bruins, huh? Nice pick.” Jim’s reaction when I told him my team. Apparently they’re one of the Original Six.

Only deeper into the season would I add more meat to my roster of adoration. Brad Marchand and his aggressively idiosyncratic way of skating that Jim chalks up to Brad’s short stature. Then later in the season, new players arrived. Two from the Caps, Orlov and Hathaway, and one from the Redwings, blue-eyed Bertuzzi with the flow of blade and hair, and a hockey smile that makes me jiggle like a blood clot.

Jim is from New Jersey, so he started the season with the New York Rangers and the New Jersey Devils. The aged voice of the Rangers’ announcer was a soothing nostalgia for the coast Jim left nearly a decade ago. Calling him back to his youth and roots. But when you are two people in a house with only one TV, you end up watching the shows and teams of your partner. So while Jim has endured too many hours of “Alone,” “Insecure,” and sexy Spanish language shows, he was cool with watching every single Bruins game with me. Like most of our tastes, we overlap but don’t totally align. So his favorite players proved to be Trent Frederick, for his assertive scrappiness, and Dimitry Orlov for his style.

Charlie, Jeremy, Brad, Tyler, Trent, and Dimitry, men who meant nothing to me a year ago are the men we spent three nights a week with, watching their sandpaper games and esoteric crisscross of wood and carbon fiber.

My entire life has been sports-less. Barely even dipping a toe in anything close to sport or competition. But one year, when I was about 6 or 7, I was the goalie for our little soccer team. Beyond the loss of self-esteem, I barely remember anything about the experience. The other girls were quicker on their feet and stronger in their confidence. My “theory of mind” bloomed early and grew into more of a challenging neurosis than a helpful awareness, so even as a little girl, I was hyper-aware of everyone around me. Aware and compare. Faster. Prettier. Cleaner. The coach made me the goalie, and my tiny neurotic mind chalked it up to my fatness more easily filling up the goal than the other girls all lithe and light. The net was isolation and exclusion. An onslaught of ball-kicks to my face. The goalie was the target, and I was the goalie. Yet, it wasn’t until watching hockey that I finally understood that the goalie is not the target, the goalie is the sentinel. The goalie protects the goal, and every other player protects the goalie.

It was during the 2022 playoffs, as I was entranced by the “big cat” moves of Vasilevskiy in the net, that I became obsessed with goalies. By October of that same year, goalie Jeremy Swayman became my favorite Bruins player. He goes from grizzly to spider in one pass of the puck. Thus, my love for the other Bruins goaltender, Linus Ullmark, wasn’t far behind. And the realization hit me around the 8^th game of the season; I’m a “goalie whore.” Some may find the term “whore” more offensive than my favorite word “cunt,” but I’m all about context and intention, and my point is, I fucking love goalies.

Jeremy and Linus are tight on the ice and even tighter off. They spend holidays together, Jeremy like an uncle to Linus’ kids. I know this because a fan goes digging; a fan follows the Instagram accounts of players and searches their names for news stories. But the connection between Jeremy and Linus became a “thing” on the rink, even to the non-fans, at the start of the 2021-2022 season. After every win, the two would embrace on the ice. They’d stand opposite each other and bend over only to spring back up with blocker arms and big sticks held high, they’re overly-padded forms forming X’s on the ice; then they’d embrace. It became known as “The Hug” and continues to this day. For a sport full of hits and blood, this visual display of sweetness was refreshing.

It was recently announced that Linus is a finalist for the Vezina Trophy, which goes to the goalie considered “to be the best at this position.” If you’re into stats, Ullmark finished 40-6-1 with a 1.89 goals-against average and a .938 save percentage. Linus’ dog died a month or so ago, and he had the pup memorialized on his helmet. His eyes have appeared vacant ever since. The whole concept of “there-not-there” blowing a tire right in his eye. I think about Linus’ empty eyes more than my tumbling muffin of a heart can bear.

As the season continued, my hockey watching became so serious that even the phrase “activate the D,” crisply enunciated by a bombshell reporter, didn’t faze me. Sure, it was sexy to watch Marchand on the bench rubbing down the stick he perched vertically between his legs, all while he eagle-eyed the ice like a quick Napoleonic predator. And my eyelids quivered as I saw players stripped down to their leanness without all their layers and pads as Jim explained hockey gear to me; garters, socks, and cups. So reminiscent of women’s lingerie. The tautness of straps and pressure of clasps on thighs and hips is sensually distracting, yet even the knowledge of their undergarments didn’t sexualize my new sport. Hockey needs no sex to entice me.

While I’ve worn my fair share of garter belts and stockings, up until this year, I’d never worn the apparel of another. The closest I’ve come to wearing fandom are shirts from my favorite dive bars or bands. The concept of associating myself with a “group” via my clothing was frankly terrifying. Like walking into an invite-only party with a counterfeit invitation gilded in brass. I’m not a joiner, but I’m not the lone wolf of my mother or partner either. Maybe it – again – stems from being a fat kid. The constant urgency to not be noticed visually. Ironic being that I’m always noticed audibly. But hockey changed me. I now have three pieces of Bruins apparel, the latest, which Jim gave me for my birthday, is an Away jersey with this emblazoned on the back:

                                                    SWAYMAN

                                                            1

My team pride now outweighs my uncomfortable anxiety, so what was once shunned is now a polyester talisman of non-anonymity.

For a new hockey fan, I was expecting a lot more fighting, but apparently the NHL has been trying to “family friendly” the sport away from it’s hyper-brutal days of the 80’s and 90’s. But what hockey does adopt is participatory violence. Players enter a contract to engage in contained aggression. Violence that won’t get out of hand. I’m still confused as to the exact point when a scrum becomes a brawl, but I’m getting better at identifying when a fight on the ice is getting beyond even the referees’ command. Pileups can slow-transform into writhing fights. One player checks another, or hits too hard against the glass, and suddenly each player is magnetic, pulling all the others in like steel-blade shavings until it's a black hole of bodies and a glove-littered event horizon. I am normally emotionally sensitive to yelling or aggression due to a childhood of living on the liminal shore of bruised backs and concussions. But when the violence is participatory, it becomes surprisingly emotionally calming. I am rapt at the slow-motion replays as facial expressions warp and morph, and helmets separate from heads like boosters from rockets. It’s the blood that determines how bad the penalty is, but a kidney punch will get you tossed pretty quickly.

Speaking of tossing, if your salad is tossed in hockey it has less to do with your asshole and more to do with your hair. If I played hockey, I’d try and turn that into a taunt somehow, but while I’m good with word, I’m bad at insult. I take too long and cut too deep. Whereas in hockey, trash-talk has been elevated to the cerebral game of the “chirp.” A chirp is inherently quick and cutting, not a howl or a yowl. Swift and sophisticated incitements get thrown like punches in a skate-by so that by the time the meaning is revealed, you’re standing in an insouciant breeze of shit-talk. A chirp is often unheard, the language of the birds. Unless a player is mic’d up, you may never hear the chirp in real-time. It’s the argot only of the ice, the provocative pillow talk of players.

65-12-5

I’ve never been one for stats, so prior to this past year I wouldn’t have understood the significance of the above numbers. These are the Bruins’ stats for the 2022-23 season.

65 wins

12 losses

5 losses in overtime

Watching the bulk of those 82 games (due to a geographic blackout, we couldn’t watch any games against the Colorado Avalanche) was meditative. Hockey moves fast. The rubber puck, a fast-darting pupil across the white of ocular ice. My mind could settle into the meditation of movement and the collapse of time. One day, we will attend a Bruins game in person, rather than watching on our trunk TV as we devour take-out Mexican. Does the crowd at an NHL game become the physical manifestation of the genius loci? The spirit of the stadium inflating our flesh with the centrifugal strands of cotton candy. I sure hope so.

Skate blades were originally built of bone, and it’s likely that more records were broken by the Bruins this year than bones were broken by all of the players in the NHL. But the regular season is a different beast than playoffs, an anomaly that Craig and Jim both warned me about with firm echoes of, “playoff hockey is different” and “nobody is safe in the playoffs.” As the run for the cup ended for the Bruins, the empathy I had for the players overwhelmed me. I turned off the TV to avoid stiff-backed Bergeron’s slack face. Wanting to be ignorant of all their pain. Their sadness and second-guessing. Their disappointment or maybe rage. But Jim said not to worry, it’s their job, and “they’ve all been there before, or will be, at some time or another.” I have worried about both my goalies since, but social media has shown me that Linus is helping kids with cancer and Jeremy is having jam band sessions in a well-outfitted garage in Alaska.

Two days after the Bruins lost to the Panthers, Craig called to check on my mood. One year ago, it never would have occurred to me that I’d need to be “checked on” because of a sports team. Before becoming a fan of hockey, I was naïve about the pull of sports. I was judgmental. Unenlightened and inexperienced. Innocent. There is an entire world behind the glass. A community of spectators and fans. Entering this world is akin to the thrill I felt when reading “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” as a kid, and realizing that multiple experiences can exist beyond my own myopic consciousness. The sphere of my comprehension of humanity widened, a face-off intimacy of understanding. Chalk it up to puck luck, but hockey has softened my heart, expanded my mind, and made me a part of a community.

As a lifelong Blackhawks fan, Craig ended our conversation with this instruction, “Here’s what you need to remember to make the losses less bitter and the wins even sweeter; be a hockey fan first and a fan of your team second.”

“But I can still fucking hate Trocheck and Gudas, right?” I spouted back.

“Oh, of course,” he gleefully confirmed. 

A pic I snapped of our tv during an epic game around the holidays. This is going to be our Holiday Card this year. 

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