The One Where I Become A Die-Hard Hockey Fan

Dedicated sports fan.

I don't like sport. And I certainly don't do sport. My years of secondary school PE follow this pattern: Year 7 - went, but used excuses so I could be a referee. Year 8 - same as the previous year. Year 9 - incapacitated for the majority of the year due to broken wrists. Year 10 - again, incapacitated. Year 11 - bunked off, hid in a Cockcroft science lab and worked on my GCSE Biology. I'm such a rebel. Then, the London 2012 Olympics happened I am became a sports addict, or at least for a couple of weeks in August I did. I watched every sport going: gymnastics, canoe slalom, rowing, boxing, female weightlifting, shooting, swimming - hey, Ryan Lochte, you can take a dip in my pool any day. You name it and, providing it isn't football, I watched it. I even had the total luck to get to go to Horseguards and hang out in Her Maj's backgarden and watch the beach volleyball, where the USA smashed the Netherlands and the Russian Federation.



Now it is not too cliched to say that Canada is obsessed by hockey. It even has a song with the lyric 'hockey is the game the land gave us.' (Insert insensitive colonialism joke here). Hockey is a big deal here in the Great White North. They are obsessed. There was recently some thing/dispute/argument/money problem going on with the NHL and it all stopped and many many Canadians had to enter Hockey Rehab for withdrawal symptoms. I wasn't really paying attention, y'know, I'm just not into sport that much. Yet, I could not move to Canada and not go see a hockey game. And who better to go and see than Ottawa's home team, the Ottawa Senators?



So as I have made abundantly clear, if you ask me a question about sport, I don't know the answer. However, I naively assumed that the Ottawa Sens are the cream of the crop when it comes to hockey. Although this is probably due to some warped logic that, as I'm living in Ottawa, obviously the hockey team for Ottawa will be amazing. Obviously. As far as I can tell, there aren't that many NHL teams, as opposed to say, how many zillion Premiership football teams there seem to be. Let's just say that, now I am a die-hard hockey fan, I will shout for the Sens all the way and they will always be the best, regardless of whether they actually are or not.



Look how enormous it is!

The home of the Sens is the Scotiabank Place. I am midly dyslexic, so I first read that as Scotiabank Palace and had a little laugh to myself about Canadian hockey obsession and how they cannot escape their monarchist tendencies, however hard they try to. And then I read the name of the arena properly and was sad that there was no longer a place for my colonial colony. The Scotiabank is huge.

Fair play to the Sens and the NHL, they know how to squeeze money out of their fans.  A quick peruse of the NHL website and its shop, and it transpires that there are rubber duck sets for every single NHL team. I collect rubber ducks, and I am so so desperate to get my hands on some Sens rubber ducks. So desperate! Please, any fair readers out there who would like to buy me some, I would be forever in your debt!



But it has to be said, the best purchases we made were for purple candy floss. You heard me, purple candy floss. Screw that pink stuff you can get in England, there was purple candy floss! And it was so delicious. I know, I know, I'm supposed to be telling you all about a major league hockey game, and instead I'm waxing lyrical about candy floss. But you had to taste it! Eventually we figured out it was grape flavoured, but it was just so good! Plus it made us hyperactive, turned our tongues the same shade of pink as Eliot the dragon in Disney's 'Pete's Dragon' and it also stained our finger tips. It's the little things, y'know? 



It's safe to say that structure doesn't seem to play an especially important role in a hockey game. Suddenly, both teams appeared doing some kind of warm up - Gabby thought the game had started already - and then they were both gone, and it was all a bit of a blur. In fact, it was hard to know when kick off, or should I say, puck off, even happened. But the pre-match hullabaloo reached its zenith in the singing of the national anthems of the USA and Canada. They wheeled out an opera singer to belt them both out, and we were exhorted to stand. I made like a true patriot and clamped my hand to my heart in a way that was totally genuine and in no way a sarcastic, gently mocking gesture. Star Spangled Banner didn't get rousingly sung, but the Pittsburgh Penguins fans were in the minority. O Canada was a different affair. Those Canadians belted it out like their lives depended on it. Even the random bit when hald way through it starts being sung in French. And towards the end, they all started wooping. I wooped. I like to join in. I tried singing God Save the Queen afterwards, but people stared and I was intimidated.



What to say about the match? The basic gist is, they each kept trying to score, but the goal keepers were too good. Then the Penguins did score, the Canadians clapped politely, and the Sens responded by trying to crush the Penguins into the crash barriers. This worked, until a couple of them got sent off for basically trying to slice the legs off people with their skates. And I got really in to the violence. I am ashamed to admit, but there's nothing more exhilarating than watching grown men openly brawl on the ice and try to make out they're just doing a tackle or something. It's very homoerotic! Especially as, from a distance, a tackle does look like a particularly vigorous cuddle.



Fight!

To this day, I am still none the wiser about the structure of a hockey match. There seem to be four periods, but the last one is only five minutes, and there seemed to be extra time, but I'm not sure. When the Sens finally did score, the arena errupted.  Eventually, the game ended, or so we thought, with a draw. Then it was penalties time. Essentially, the Sens drew. In reality, they lost on penalites. The Penguins rushed the rink and were all happy at having won, and I fell into a depression that our beloved team had lost. We may need counselling to overcome the trauma. Sens, how could you do this to us? How could you? We, your loyal loyal supporters feel betrayed by your inability to win that day.



Hockey aside, the whole experience was a thoroughly North American affair. The advertising was like being hit repeatedly over the head with a brick. There were weird dancers and t-shirt cannons, and a kiss camera. It did flash on two very burly guys who pretended to get it on, but apart from that, it just stuck to gorgeous young couples and a few old ones, who looked surprised and unsure of whether they remembered what to do for a kiss. The cameras also fell upon some guys who had brought homemade banners which read: "Our wifes are home cleaning." I don't know what makes me want to vom more, the misogyny or the bad grammar. Probably the grammar.

I know I have spent a lot of this blog as a whole gushing about living the Canadian dream and getting to experience so many new and exciting things, but I just can't shut up about it. I am loving life out here and loving the chance to be brave and out-going and feeling liberated to just live with abandon. It is amazing. I feel so blessed! And I really don't want it to ever end.