relationship status: hockey?

There’s no insanely sappy, sentimental story tying me to hockey, honestly. There’s no childhood memories, no inherited passion, no tradition of fandom passed down from on high. There’s just me, a friend, and a promise that “come on, you have to watch one game. One game! One game when they come back from the lockout.”

The Dallas Stars either have a very simple or a very complicated history, depending on who you ask. They’re a team that moved, or was stolen, or was stolen and moved, and their fans are either a small but intense group, a bunch of immoral bandwagoners for rooting for a stolen team, or nonexistent. I knew that Mike Modano existed, somewhere in the back of my mind, as I was growing up, flipping past Stars news in the paper on my way to the baseball. Hockey was kind of there, but so was basketball and football.

Hockey lockouts are the worst, but I probably wouldn’t be a fan without the last one.

I wasn’t hooked the first game I watched, but I was intrigued. I don’t remember many of the specifics, really, other than the fact that the Stars won - one of the seemingly few times they’d do so that season. I was drawn in by the rush of it, though, despite the fact that I understood basically nothing about the game. It was fast and frenetic and I was watching it on a 13-inch screen across a living room in a desolate apartment in Waco, TX and while I didn’t fall completely in love at that moment, I at least felt some kind of stirring, something that kept me tuning in the occasional times I found them on whatever channel they’d gotten shuffled to.

I fell in love, though, in October 2013, when my good friend Graham Jenkins, himself a dedicated and long-time Stars fan, the one to whom I’d made the promise to start watching, and I went to the Halloween game, and I got to experience the adrenaline rush that is live hockey, even near too many Jets fans. I was in. Hockey, and specifically the Stars, had me - even though they lost that game 2-1 in a shootout.

Of course, it’s not been without growing pains. Hockey has its share of issues, things I can’t wallpaper over with my love of the game. There’s the sexual assault and rape allegations, the standard issue problematic teams and fans, the whole fighting and concussions and players encouraged to be too tough for their own good thing, everything you have to make your deal with the devil’s sport-related minion in order to remain a fan of any sport. It’s a part of being a fan - and so far, the positives have outweighed the negatives.

I got lucky, you know. The Stars have turned from laughingstock to powerhouse in the few seasons I’ve been a fan, making the playoffs, gathering young talent, having their captain turn into one of the best players in the entire league, getting new uniforms, the whole kit and caboodle. I don’t know if I’d be planning to buy half-season tickets if they were still at the bottom of their division, but now I can’t imagine my life without losing my voice in Victory Green.

Hockey’s seen me through depression, through frustration, through friendships and the dissolution thereof, through baseball, through writer’s block. It’s good, as a writer, to have a sport you can unashamedly love, a sport that you don’t have to hide or get rid of affiliation, a sport you can watch through green-colored glasses.

It’s bad, but all sports are bad. It’s good, in that all sports are good. It’s communal, it’s crazy, it’s impossible, and I’m in love with it.