The Silly Suffering and Sacrifice of Watching Sports and Game Sevens

What did you stay up until midnight (or later) for? Are you crazy or something?

Life, it just goes on
When the traveler's gone
And that's the hardest part
For time has no respect
For a lonely man with a longing heart
Cause once you're where you've wanted, everything's so fast

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One of my very favorite books in the world is Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. I was talking with a good friend about this book a little while ago, and he pointed out that the book drove a point home he had never quite understood explicitly: the cosmos is designed to make you fall madly in love with creatures, only for you to have to give them away, eventually entrusting them back to Where they came from.

Parents understand this from the moment the umbilical cord is severed, I think. To know something or someone other than yourself and to love it is, ultimately, to prepare for the agony of losing it, whether to kindergarten, college, marriage, or some other tragedy. It is only left for us to decide how we will face that parting when it comes.

Sports are a microcosm of a very many things, but that principle is right there, too. You get excited about a rookie phenom with the understanding that eventually, he won’t play for your team anymore. You will get to watch the journey and enjoy it alongside him to whatever extent fans can, but you will also one day have to endure the end of his career that will come either from career-ending injury or slow decline, assuming it isn’t pre-empted by a shocking trade that sends him away in his prime.

A team is that way, too. Every year’s squad is its own band of brothers, with every player living that year of their lives as a person they won’t quite be the following year. Time changes us all.

A question I’ve been asked more than a few times is, “What player’s jersey (sweater) should I buy?” And I tend to answer it with an eye to that cold reality of guarding against time and disappointment. If you’re investing in a piece of the team’s history localized within a single human being’s career, then you ideally want to pick someone who’s going to be there for longer than he isn’t, someone whose career is going to make you smile more than shake your head.

But no matter whose sweater you choose, you are making a gamble, a “bet on future performance,” as Tom Gaglardi said a few days ago. And yet, when you look around the arena, you can see that thousands of people are more than willing to make that gamble, even when there are a million reasons why it is more likely to go wrong than right.

Because sports are about love, in their way. You don’t have to stand in line for an autograph or a selfie to understand that there are a whole lot of people who feel things about the Dallas Stars. Identifying with those players’ pursuit of glory and delight is a risk every season, but it’s one with highs so incredible that you get hooked in spite of the eventual disappointment that has come for 25 straight years now.

Take the second period last night. It was far, far too much to process with mere human emotions, an overwhelming amount of joy and anger and sadness and shock and surprise and indignation and vindication. And when it all wound down for the second intermission with the Stars somehow ahead 4-3, there was still, impossibly, a whole third period of hockey still to play. And you could kind of feel how precarious things were, at that point. The joy of those four goals flowed like triumphant fist-pumps after sliding like Indiana Jones underneath a closing door. The Stars were winning, and what a story this would be if it ended this way, right? But there’s always another boulder rolling at you in the playoffs, unless you make it to the summit.

Every hockey game is that same sort of experience, in the playoffs. The highs are higher for the dread they defy, but until the win is final, that fear of what lurks underneath (or up above) pushes on the bubble of every bit of joy. That drives you to celebrate those happy moments defiantly, knowing you may not get another one. Playoff hockey is a frantic search for winning lottery tickets on an artillery range.

That does things to you, that experience. Everyone from absurd fans to purportedly professional broadcasters make fools of themselves by sanctimoniously screaming about how their team is the good guys and the other the bad, because all this pent-up energy and anxiety has to go somewhere. Righteous indignation is a “NO SPEED LIMIT” sign on the neural pathways of fandom, and that electricity crackles in every corner of a building during a playoff game.

After the game is over and the adrenaline begins to drain, a newfound lucidity forces you to face just how far along each fan is in their process of cutting the cord connecting their heart to their jersey. And when Lian Bichsel goes into the boards, or when Cale Makar goes down for a penalty call, or when Mikko Rantanen scores his fourth point of a single period, most of us discover that we aren’t nearly as detached as we’d like to think.

After each of the Stars’ prior three losses in this series, you are likely feeling terrible right now. Last night could have ended differently, and you have probably dwelt incessantly on whose fault it is that you were robbed of that joy—whether they were wearing blue and burgundy, black and white stripes, a three-piece suit, or Victory Green. But it did not not end differently, and so the Stars are now facing elimination.

This is only the first round, but we always have to remember that every round might also be the last. Indignation after an excruciating loss isn’t necssarily undeserved, but it sure as shootin’ doesn’t get you into any better shape when it comes to weathering the marathon that you hope a playoff run will be. Indignation also tends to blind you to reality, which is to say that Dallas’s hands aren’t any cleaner of the sort of whatever-it-takesism than the next team, probably. Dean Evason said “The Minnesota Wild don’t dive” two years ago, and we just watched two great coaches of great teams in Florida snipe at each other about how their guys don’t take cheap shots at the other guys…unless the other guys did it first. Then it’s justified, because if that’s how it’s going to be, then fine, game on. Everyone has principles until the refs miss a call or two.

Players are humans, and while some hockey players are quite obviously dirtier than others, this is not a sport that rewards gentlemanly play by any normal societal standards. Gabriel Landeskog is cold-cocking players in the face with gloved punches after whistles, and Roope Hintz is cross-checking Nathan MacKinnon up high as turnabout for what MacKinnon did to him last spring. Mason Marchment has been fined for embellishment in the past, which means he was warned about it before that. Jack Drury took a hand off his stick to try to unbalance Lian Bichsel enough to win the puck from him, and that action led to Bichsel’s going hard into the boards in what could’ve been a season-ending injury, but miraculously wasn’t. These are facts, not indictments of one team’s sinfulness or validations of another's purity.

Cale Makar is a generational talent who finally had the sort of game the Avalanche have been waiting for last night. That’s really the bigger story, even if his assiduous work in drawing a penalty call or two in this series highlights the hypocrisy of his team’s fans or broadcasters crowing about Dallas’s supposed diving. John Buccigross has known Cale Makar since when he was in college, so you can’t expect him to call Makar out for going down after a glove bump from Marchment or a slow pick from Granlund the way he did by retweeting a Colorado broadcaster’s incandescent outrage at Jamie Benn taking a stick in the face. He’s a human, just like you are, and he’s going to naturally see different players through different lenses.

The Minnesota Wild have, pretty much since Day 1, anointed themselves the State of Hockey, marketing their franchise as the One True Hockey Place in the USA. They have won diddly squat in that time, but it hasn’t stopped them from leaning hard into the idea that Dallas “stole” their team, that Minnesota hockey is somehow purer and better than other types, that their grit and determination is just a little bit better than the next guy’s. And that’s all well and good, because every team has to rally around something. But when you’re not invested in the struggle, you can see the absurdity of any team’s credo.

Vegas and Florida have won the last two Stanley Cups, for crying out loud. If you think they did so through fastidious, law-abiding approaches in the front office and on the ice, you haven’t been paying attention. They’ve both been cold-hearted and calculating, but because their decisions held up to the gauntlet of the playoffs, their fans have gotten to taste the ultimate victory that has eluded Dallas since 1999. You don’t have to copy them, but you can’t deny they know what they’re doing, and they’re really good at it.

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You remember Game 6 against Vegas last year, right?

The Stars took a 3-2 lead on the road, and they had a 0-0 game in the third period. They’d been robbed by Adin Hill on a few Grade-A chances, and it was a tight game they easily could’ve won, had just one more bounce gone their way. But stop me if you’ve heard this one: it didn’t.

Instead, Noah Hanifin (acquired at the deadline while Mark Stone on LTIR) found the far corner through a screen (and perhaps a slight deflection off Suter), and that one goal would be the winning tally. Dallas, after clawing back from a 2-0 deficit, had won three straight to go up 3-2, only to get pushed to Game 7, with all the pressure in the world on their shoulders as Vegas looked to be regaining their historically impenetrable selves.

I remember the day of that Game 7, and it was torture, man. Game sevens are no fun until they’re won, because the tension of win-or-go-home after splitting the previous six games is unimaginable until you’re there, experiencing it. It’s just a nightmare, every time, unless you get to wake up from it after the final horn. Then, and only then, do you get to turn and grab your comrades in arms and scream in each other’s overjoyed faces.

Dallas has played six Game 7s in the Jamie Benn era, and they are 3-3 in that time.

• 2016, second round vs. St. Louis: a demoralizing and lopsided home loss.
  2019, second round vs. St. Louis: a pitiful offensive display and overtime heartbreaker

• 2020, second round vs. Colorado: Joel Kiviranta hat trick miracle in the bubble

• 2022, first round vs. Calgary: another pitiful offensive display and overtime heartbreaker/Jake Oettinger’s playoff apotheosis

• 2023, second round vs. Seattle: Roope Hintz and Wyatt Johnston’s beautiful goals seal the deal

• 2024, first round vs. Vegas: Wyatt Johnston scored another huge goal, but Radek Faksa backhands the Stars to the second round

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Pete DeBoer, of course, is undefeated in Game 7s. The Stars will have the last line change and ability to match up against their preferred lines and defense pairings. Mackenzie Blackwood has looked thoroughly mortal for two games in a row, and the Stars have seen just about every dormant offensive player bust out of hibernation in the last two games. These are reasons for hope that you already knew, but it probably helps to hear them today nonetheless.

Trying to predict how this Game 7 will go is foolishness, though, so I won’t try. A lot might depend on whether Miro Heiskanen makes a return, but as close to a talisman as he seems after his long absence, nobody is guaranteeing anything but anxiety over the next two days.

That’s the bargain of being a fan. In for a penny’s worth of exuberance, and in for a pound of furious heartache. And you don’t get to choose which side the coin lands on.

The people who will choose the outcome of the game will, hopefully, be the players on the ice, as DeBoer himself said after last night’s game. Colorado has some incredible individuals that can win any given game at any given time, but then again, Dallas has surely seeded plenty of doubt in the Avalanche psyche. If that’s going to pay off at any point, it has to be now.

We are a thousand miles away from the regular season. We are at the ultimate experience of playoff hockey: Game 7 against a historical and contemporary rival. You tell stories about these games, no matter how they turn out, but it’s a lot more fun to hear the tale when you know it has a happy ending.

Right now, all we know is that happiness is not a luxury anyone can afford until whatever happens tomorrow night at (mercifully) 7:00pm CDT. Last year, Vegas played a perfect Game 6, and it bought them one more game in their season before it ended. Dallas will be hoping to see Colorado close a similar deal on Saturday.

As for you, the only thing you can know is that you will remember how this feels. You have chosen this route, this fandom, knowing that hurt is far more common than comfort, knowing that you sit down to watch players who never know when their last shift might be in any game, in any season, or in their career. It’s journey with such a likelihood of pain that you’d be foolish to even consider it, if you had a choice.

But you probably don’t have that choice, anymore. Children are born in a moment of rapture accompanied with crying, and on an infinitely smaller scale, fandom is similarly born in the midst of the tears of the other side, the ones forced to reckon with the end. And once that fandom is born, that joy and suffering go far beyond of your control.

Sports are a self-contained dose of reality, a sixty-minute lifetime that goes on for a bit more if that’s what it takes. But they’re played by people who bleed and suffer for real, and your own tears or screams or hoots or hollers are no less meaningful for being vicarious. You wear the jersey with the numbers not because you want to be different from everyone else, but because you want to signal how similar your suffering has been to those who understand it best.

It’s time, once again, to suffer together.