How to Love Hockey in the Texas Summer
The best love transcends its season
One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing
Yes you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky
But 'til that morning, there's nothin' can harm you
I don’t know anybody whose favorite month of the year is August.
Probably it starts in childhood, where August is the harbinger of a new school year and, more devastatingly, the death knell of every summer vacation. June is bliss, the Friday night of the weekend. It’s a month that brings not just its own freedom, but the promise of another month of Saturdays in July. The beginning of summer holds, both chronologically and experientially, the longest vacation days of the year.
Late June is also a time packed with the final celebrations of hockey: the Stanley Cup gets awarded, new players get drafted, and loads of new contracts are signed as the calendar flips to July. The hockey season may have ended in June, but its reverberations last well into the next month, just as those warm evenings with friends in high school carry us past midnight before a single yawn dares to show its face.
In August, a dreadful Sunday afternoon calm settles in. You still try to squeeze the last of the juice out of the weekend, but as the great Monday1 morning draws nearer, the few remaining days of freedom lack the same sense of infinitude, tainted with the knowledge of an approaching end. By that point, the still-warm evenings are less a gift than a warning, as an establishment turns the house lights up at 2am to clear out lingering revelers.
For kids, August is dreary because it’s the last of a carefree thing; for adults, August is a nightmare of crammed-in vacations, back-to-school prep, and absurd energy bills; and for hockey fans, August stinks because it’s the one month of the year where hockey goes completely dark.
Well, I shouldn’t say it’s completely dark. Sean is flying off to watch and learn about hockey as we speak, and of course you all know about the wonderful open meetup we’re having next Tuesday at BoomerJack’s.
In fact, one of the coolest things about Gavin’s event is that it’s happening right when hockey fans need it most, or at least I do. August can be the toughest time to remember why we love hockey, in no small part because it’s the time of year where ice itself is at a premium.
Growing up, my family lived next to a church parking lot where we could ride our bikes, shoot hoops, and play street hockey. There were countless late evenings in summer where my brother and I (and sometimes one of our sisters) would tromp out after dinner to shoot a Mylec hockey ball into a chicken-wire net as the sunlight faded into shadow. Youth at its apex raises the question: is the ignorance of mortality the same thing as immortality? Memory suggests it might just be.
One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing
Yes you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky
But 'til that morning, there's nothin' can harm you
I don’t know anybody whose favorite month of the year is August.
Probably it starts in childhood, where August is the harbinger of a new school year and, more devastatingly, the death knell of every summer vacation. June is bliss, the Friday night of the weekend. It’s a month that brings not just its own freedom, but the promise of another month of Saturdays in July. The beginning of summer holds, both chronologically and experientially, the longest vacation days of the year.
Late June is also a time packed with the final celebrations of hockey: the Stanley Cup gets awarded, new players get drafted, and loads of new contracts are signed as the calendar flips to July. The hockey season may have ended in June, but its reverberations last well into the next month, just as those warm evenings with friends in high school carry us past midnight before a single yawn dares to show its face.
In August, a dreadful Sunday afternoon calm settles in. You still try to squeeze the last of the juice out of the weekend, but as the great Monday1 morning draws nearer, the few remaining days of freedom lack the same sense of infinitude, tainted with the knowledge of an approaching end. By that point, the still-warm evenings are less a gift than a warning, as an establishment turns the house lights up at 2am to clear out lingering revelers.
For kids, August is dreary because it’s the last of a carefree thing; for adults, August is a nightmare of crammed-in vacations, back-to-school prep, and absurd energy bills; and for hockey fans, August stinks because it’s the one month of the year where hockey goes completely dark.
Well, I shouldn’t say it’s completely dark. Sean is flying off to watch and learn about hockey as we speak, and of course you all know about the wonderful open meetup we’re having next Tuesday at BoomerJack’s.
In fact, one of the coolest things about Gavin’s event is that it’s happening right when hockey fans need it most, or at least I do. August can be the toughest time to remember why we love hockey, in no small part because it’s the time of year where ice itself is at a premium.
Growing up, my family lived next to a church parking lot where we could ride our bikes, shoot hoops, and play street hockey. There were countless late evenings in summer where my brother and I (and sometimes one of our sisters) would tromp out after dinner to shoot a Mylec hockey ball into a chicken-wire net as the sunlight faded into shadow. Youth at its apex raises the question: is the ignorance of mortality the same thing as immortality? Memory suggests it might just be.
As I got older, I tried to prolong the hockey bliss in different (albeit less visceral) ways. Between classes in college, I would pop into the library and plug my headphones into one of the computer terminals in order to watch and listen to highlights of all the previous night’s games. Before NHL Center Ice, before GameCenter, and before ESPN TV, this was where I really began to hear and know all the broadcasters from around the league, rather than just the ones I was able to watch regularly.
Nowadays, I’m beyond lucky to be able to attend 40 or more hockey games every year. I don’t experience most of those the same way, because responsibility changes the nature of even the deepest joys. (Just ask whoever has to do the cooking at Thanksgiving.) But thankfully, it’s only changed that joy rather than removed it. I still love getting home from a game around midnight and winding down by watching highlights I might have missed, or watching the same ones I just saw, but now accompanied by the broadcasters I didn’t get to hear while I was in the building.
I don’t want to forget about the joy this sport brings, but it’s hard sometimes, and I’ve learned that I can’t force hockey to balance out all the difficult things on the other side of life’s ledger. If I’m really to keep loving this thing, then I have to be willing to meet it where it is, and to take what it’s willing to give rather than what I think I deserve to get out of it. The big lie is that if we get just one more bit of happiness, one more bit of control over our lives, then we’ll finally be able to withstand the toughest days without losing that happy feeling, because the good will drown out the bad. If only this were true.
What we eventually learn is that even the most delightful parts of life are incapable of protecting us from suffering, because they simply aren’t made of the same stuff. You can’t kill a bacterial infection with a cello, at least not directly. That doesn’t lessen the beauty of the music, but it’s a hard truth that even the soaring heights of a symphony can be drowned out by the quiet beeping of a heart rate monitor.
August is when I have to work hardest to protect my love of hockey from all those encroachments of life. As a sport, it almost begs to be put on the shelf from now until training camp, but I’ve learned that I can’t afford to see hockey as just a distraction or a pastime. Instead, I have to hold hockey close, keeping it as a representation of what it is to love something that isn’t created just for me. It is far more difficult to reignite a spark of joy after I begin to treat it like an on-demand product. The best loves are approached with reverence and tended like a walled garden, never forgetting that there are things that would gladly destroy it without understanding why.
I don’t play much street hockey anymore, but I do try to stay pretty plugged in through August, at least to a healthy extent. I’ve realized I need to to keep the hockey engines idling if I’m to be prepared to ramp up in September, probably because I’m far less talented than all the exceptionally gifted folks who deserve a cottage month (and probably multiple ones) just to regain a portion of their sanity after the breakneck pace of October to July.
Most fans also need the same kind of break from any sport after investing the better part of a year, and that’s why I was fairly nervous going into the summer a year ago. I knew that in Dallas especially, the summer was when lots of folks stopped caring about hockey and basketball and began getting amped (or bummed out) for Cowboys Season. I had no idea what to expect from a reader-supported venture like this one going into the summer, and at times, I worried that I’d have to re-launch the entire thing in September after a massive drop-off following the end of the playoffs.
It turns out, that hasn’t really happened. And while August is just a few days old, the almighty Numbers tell me that a bunch of you sickos are still around, still happy to Do That Hockey even when the “feels like” outside is 105 and rising. A month I was worried about has, for two years now, turned out to be one that brings unexpected gratitude. I genuinely can’t thank you all enough for keeping this going. It still doesn’t feel like it should be possible.
I’m looking forward to meeting or re-meeting some of y’all on Tuesday. I’ve realized how much I need the reminders that this is all real, that there are actual human beings on the other side of the internet who love some of the same things that I do, and who have experienced the same hockey that I have—and often, who have noticed things I completely missed. We’re not nearly as connected as we used to be, but maybe that serves to strengthen what connective tissue we do still have, the way a footpath gets more recognizable as more people walk it.
In August, I try not to treat hockey as a thing to be grasped or shelved, but as a thing to be grateful alongside. There are still highlights to watch and to look forward to, even if some of the names won’t be the same next year. Ilya Lyubushkin and Mavrik Bourque might get another 2-on-1 rush this season, but it will have to be for Nashville, not Dallas. That makes me a little sad, and I suppose it should.
But it’s also something that reminds me of that deeper love for hockey itself. The absurdity of sports should never be forgotten, but just because something is absurd doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and there are few things more wonderful than delighting in the absurd alongside one another.
It is up to us, both individually and corporately, to keep the memory of what makes this sport special alive, and that’s true even when it withdraws for a month or two before exploding back upon the scene in October. Sometimes you have to carry the hockey with you for a while, but like all things, it becomes easier to do the more you practice.
This final month before players return to their teams for preseason and training camp is a gift of a special sort, because it’s the one set of four weeks (or so) without the clear narratives the other eleven months contain. Anticipation and trepidation exist alongside one another in August without any of the validation that even a preseason game can bring. For now, next year’s season sits in limbo, and all we can do it try to take what we learned from last year and paste it haphazardly onto the upcoming roster, pre-emptively making whatever adjustments we think it might merit, but knowing we are going to be wrong about some of them, if not most of them. Going back and remembering all the absurdities of the past (which is to say all the things I was wrong about) has turned out to be a nearly endless source of hockey sustenance.
The best way for me to get through August, it turns out, is for me not to see it as something to get through at all. It is instead a month to dwell within, discovering the unique gifts it holds. The ice might have to be in a glass right now, but even a sip of cold water reminds us that we are only a few degrees from something much more robust. Right now, the difference between a liquid and a solid has everything to do with my state of mind.
The parents out there will all know that school begins next week, in fact. Schools used to start back up after Labor Day only a few decades ago (and still do, in places like Washington), but we are creeping closer and closer toward year-round school, and I dread it.