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ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — My favorite line about hockey fans and hockey playoffs comes from John Madden, the ex-Devil who always kept enough of the fan he used to be growing up in the Parma Court housing projects in Toronto to understand what he saw and what he heard every April.
“It isn’t just that hockey fans are nuts,” he told me once, “it’s that we’re proud to be nuts. It’s that if you looked at us and told us we weren’t nuts, we’d get in your face and scream, ‘What the hell do you mean I’m not nuts?’”
Yes. Only in hockey can calling someone three bricks shy of a load be considered a term of endearment, but for those of you who will spend the next few days, weeks or — with luck — months living and dying with the Rangers or the Devils or with whomever your hockey team of choice is, you understand. You get it.
I sent an email to an old college friend whom I know to be a fanatical Sabres fan the other day, after Buffalo’s manic rush for the eighth seed came up short with a gut-slashing loss to the Flyers. I received an automated response, the kind you usually get when someone’s on vacation. All it said was this:
“Not talking today.
“Not e-mailing today.
“Not eating today.
“Not sleeping tonight.”
And the next day, I got the same reply. But you know that. The hockey playoffs are the most intense time of the year to be a fan who cares about a team. Yes, baseball and basketball and football inspire their own intense devotions, and nobody will accuse you of being a slacker fan in any of those games. But hockey is different. For one thing, the games themselves are different starting now, a different level of caring and intensity and passion.
For another, hockey itself is just different. On so many levels, almost all of them charming. What other sport gives you the three-star system every game, the kind of thing that seems like it was dreamt up by kids playing street hockey? What other sport gives you the playoff beard, which turns the on-ice team photo for the eventual Stanley Cup champion into a ZZ Top convention? What other sport has something as quirky as the Cup itself as its ultimate prize, with the promise of every team member taking it on a tour for a day through a hometown’s restaurants, saloons and God only knows where else?
Seriously: Can you imagine Derek Jeter tossing the Commissioner’s Trophy into a pool somewhere? Can you imagine Eli Manning dining with the Lombardi Trophy at the empty seat to his left? Can you imagine Carmelo Anthony with the Lawrence O’Brien trophy ... well, at all?
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Mike VaccaroFollow Mike, John Madden, hockey playoffs, hockey playoffs, Fla., hockey fans, Parma Court housing, hockey team, street hockey
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