1. 22
    Aug

    Day 1 (30DHC)

    Day 1: Why do you love hockey?

    I can tell you the very day I became a hockey fan, but the reason I became a hockey fan and the reason I love hockey are two distinctly different things.  I guess we can start with why I became a hockey fan.  It was September 21st, 2007 a sabres preseason game against the Columbus Blue Jackets.  i had been writing stories with my friend for some time, and she wanted me to write her a hockey one.  Sometime during the game, The enforcer a the time, Andrew Peters, started a fight that quickly turned into a full team brawl.  Petey versus the world.

    At that point the game appealed to me for pure entertainment purposes.  I found the raw violence of it, funny to say the least.  I was at a point in my life where I found violence amusing, and would laugh if people in movies got hurt in movies.  Really I was truly a rotten 17 year old.  Yet this started my love for the game.

    As I continued to watch hockey, I discovered in the Oilers a young rookie only a year older than me.  He had some of the greatest skill I had seen yet, and to be honest, he was cute.  But I never did forget how he moved the puck on his first shoot out…and ultimately his first shootout goal.  The player was Sam Gagner, and he sent my first year of hockey from entertainment to passion.  I found when I was depressed, looking forward to late night Oilers games could pull me out of my misery for just a few hours.  I started learning more about the game, how it worked.  I remembered sitting in front of the TV as a kid, and the awe I felt watching Ray Borque play for the bruins, how hockey had no meaning then, and just was pure magic (people moving as they did).  This too was magic…but for different reasons.

    I started to play in 2008, walking onto my high school team unable to skate.  I ended the season with a bang, getting a scoring chance by winging the best player on the team.  After she won a faceoff, she lost the puck, and I traveled it up the boards and passed it along the slot for my first scoring chance.  From then on, as a hockey blogger, I was hooked on the game. 

    The intensity is unmatched.  Just watch a face off and try to find something more intense…watching the sweat drip from a players nose as he leans in close, his stick blade on the ice as he stares at the puck, just waiting.  The way his breath mists before his face as he waits for a moment of untimed perfection, and the play is made before you can blink.

    Even the smells of the rink can send me for a spiral.  The sound of a blade sliding across new ice, grinding as it digs into the surface, it gives me chills.  I can and have written beautiful poetry just about the feeling hockey gives me, and have written pages on just the sensory experience the sport is.  Carbon fiber clattering against carbon fiber as sticks collide and spar in a face off.  The racket of glass as it shakes as waves of force travel around the rink.  The cheers of a crowd, muddled into background noise, easily tuned out to hear even the subtle thump of the puck against a goalie’s pads…the cushion and muffled sound of his glove…or the frustrated metallic ping of vulcanized rubber on metal.

    It’s truly poetic to me to see the veins bulge in a players neck, to see the muscles strain…the needy grasp of a fist clutching a green gatorade bottle for precious liquid.

    It’s an enthusiasm that goes far beyond entertainment.  For at this point…the sport seems as necessary as breath.

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Megan Leach, loves animals, hockey, art and movies. Mellow, will roll over for hugs and cuddles. Whiner.
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