Once upon a time, I was addicted to college basketball. Maybe it was the shorter shorts; maybe it was simply all Bobby Hurley's fault. In the summertime, when school wasn't in session, I turned to baseball. And not just any baseball, mind you, but the Atlanta Braves (perennial basement dwellers that they were in the days of TBS-only broadcasts) and the New York Mets (as Arlington Cable chose to include WWOR in its subscriber package). Somehow, I missed the hockey boat. Strangely enough, I'd been to a hockey game during this time--a Capitals-North Stars game, at that. Everything else was just on television, except for the occasional Orioles game at Memorial Stadium or a Terps game or two up at Cole Field House on the U.Md. campus. I had no idea what was out there.
Fast forward a few years--fine, MANY years--and I moved from urban to rural to not-so-rural and back to urban again. I wore out many sets of tires on pilgrimages from Arlington, VA to Boston, sometimes by way of Philly, and I became a member of EZPass. All good hockey towns, and I was gifted with a Bruins jersey on my first birthday spent within the confines of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but I still wasn't getting it. Hockey tickets were expensive (NHL; I didn't even think about the AHL at the time); Red Sox bleacher seats were in the low teens, and you could sit by the Pesky Pole for a mere $40, and this wasn't even 10 years ago. I regressed into baseball, and the Idiots of 2004 stole my heart, at least in theory. I went through a few relationships, some messy and some just plain stupid, and I even ventured so far as to live in Philly for a couple of years somewhere in between.
This is where it gets started. My dad visits me often, and of his two daughters, I'm the one that digs sports. Sharing that affinity usually gets me attendance at a few choice events, including those of three of the four professional teams in Massachusetts (not the Patriots, though). So, I've been to Bruins games, and I've heard, time and again, "Who's Rears? When did he play?" Right. That's *my* name, and I wear number 26. I also wear a captain's "C." Happy birthday to me from Dad Himself, as I mentioned before. Most of the year, it hangs in the closet, waiting--although the Bruins' run to the Stanley Cup finals made it permissible for me to wear it to work, and I showed some hometown flair, even though, all right, they're not my team.
After a few Bruins games, it was time for a Flyers game. Thanksgiving, 2006--the worst weather, the worst delay on stupid 287 because it was all under construction, and I swear I was going to run out of gas if I didn't remember that one last station off of the Sleepy Hollow exit on NY Route 9. I'd been talking with a guy I met online and was considering dating at the time, so I had that to look forward to (it didn't work out, but it gave me something to think about other than the crapass traffic). I was horribly late and missed dinner. I consoled myself with what was to come the next day, otherwise known as Black Friday: a ridiculous shopping trip through Center City with my sister. It's our ritual, when we meet for the holiday. This particular year was special, though, because Dad gifted us with seats six rows back from center ice, on the bench side, to the Philadelphia-Ottawa game. Wanting to seem as if I knew a thing or two, I picked out a player to root for on the home team (and one for my sister, too). We wore our orange and black, and I yelled my head off for this guy. Then, of all things that could happen, a puck came ricocheting into the crowd. Right. In. Front. Of. Me.
Um, yeah. I didn't get the puck. I got my hand caught between the back of the seat in the next row and the concrete riser the seat was bolted to, and I couldn't make a fist/grab the puck/pull it out because of the tight space. I was committed to it, and I couldn't close. I had to concede and let the guy in that row a few seats over have it. And I know I was on the damn Jumbotron, of course.
I continued yelling for my guy; my sister kept yelling for hers. We weren't far from the bench and we're loud (especially when in the back seat of a certain black Plymouth Sundance), so they probably heard us. Those two guys. Well, one of them must have, at least. I say this because of what happened at the end of the game. We (sister and I) were lingering, letting the crowd filter out; we were meeting up with Dad, who was sitting 20 or so rows behind us in the same section, and going to dinner. I figured, oh great, he saw me totally not get that puck, too. Awesome.
We looked at the ice for a while, long enough that we were the last people in pretty much the whole surrounding area. Except for an usher, that is. An usher... WITH A PUCK. He caught my eye and tossed me the puck. To this day, I don't know who gave him the puck, but I have an idea. Allow me to introduce, from Quispamsis, New Brunswick, a versatile two-way defenseman: Mr. Randy Jones (henceforth known as RJ08).
Now, here's the irony: Did I even follow the Flyers when I moved down? Nope. I got caught up in Phillies Phever, and when they won the World Series in 2008, well, there you go. I was also paying attention to the Red Sox winning again in 2007, so two years in a row were dominated by that other sport. I've been meaning to get to a batting cage one of these days, but I'm not sure what side I'd bat from, really. Damn you, Wii--righty in golf and lefty in baseball, which makes no sense. Oh, whatever.
RJ08 wore #6 for the Flyers for a few years--and helped win the Calder Cup in the AHL, too--and wound up in L.A., where he is in NHL 11. Then he moved to the Tampa Bay Lightning, who I remember as being the first, and only, team to have a female goalie. [I'm not going to Google it; I'm pretty sure her name was Manon Rheume. She was profiled in all of the girl-oriented magazines as someone who lived her dream, thus we should all keep trying for ours. Pretty cool.] Anyway, I learned most of RJ08's playing history backward, not in real time. He reappeared when I saw him being interviewed by that Pierre character who lurks at ice level during games on Versus and NBC. I couldn't help being a girl, and I was once again enthralled--and enticed--by his appearance, both corporeal and ethereal. He spoke well and enthusiastically about his role with the Lightning. What I thought, though, was that this rather complicates things.
The complication stems from an occurrence, perhaps of fate (or some might say coincidence), that occurred nearly six months before the RJ08 network television sighting. On a cool, windy night in November, hundreds of miles away from Boston, I was in Syracuse, NY, at my first AHL game: the Crunch versus the Hershey Bears. Talk about having no idea what I was getting into; the arena (War Memorial) was tiny. So tiny, in fact, that wherever you sat, you could smell the sweat coming off of the players. Alarming, but strangely intimate. I did no research; I barely knew which NHL teams the Crunch and Bears belonged to. This, as it turned out, would be the least of my problems.
I couldn't tell you the time on the clock at which it happened, but at some point in the first period, Hershey #24 skated onto the ice. He was fast. He was intense. And he's the only person who has been able to make my entire world stop. At the time, with the beginnings of a beard and his helmet on, he bore slight resemblance to the person whose family I was a guest of at said game. No dead ringer, for sure, but close enough that they all nodded in approval (same color hair and eyes, and the person in question had longer--and better, I'm sorry--hair in high school).
After I managed to blink, I kept trying to figure out his name. The announcer butchered it (Hershey was the away team). I wasn't sure how to say it, either; my specialty in French is days of the week and counting to ten. Finally, I got a good look at his shoulders. Then he promptly went down face-first into the ice, and came up bleeding. Lord, have mercy. Starring at center, sometimes for the Bears and sometimes for the Capitals, from the Montréal suburb of Drummondville: Mr. Mathieu Perreault (known henceforth as mperreault).
I immediately looked mperreault up on my phone. I gathered what information I could (duly noted that he's also helped his team win the Calder Cup) and filed it away for future reference in the back of my mind. Speaking of my mind, it was still racing from the "encounter" well after the game, as I followed the group back to the car and attempted to ignore the team bus sitting right there in front of the arena, idling, with a few jerseyed Hershey fans ready to greet the team and send them on their way. We had dinner at a pizza place and I couldn't focus on the food or the stupid bar game that the servers tried to pass off on us. Nope. I was done for. Then I had the five-hour drive home to deal with, sort-of-resembler and his stepmother in tow. I got home and immediately became a Caps fan. I couldn't help it.
The day after Christmas, the Capitals played the Carolina Hurricanes. It wasn't on television; I could only follow it on my phone. I thought it strange that mperreault had only a few minutes of ice time in the first period, then disappeared for the rest of the game. When I found game photos online of him facedown on the ice, bloody, half of his visor gone, and holding his broken nose in his hands, my heart actually went into my throat. I felt sick, not at the image, but that it was him.
RJ08 had a concussion right around the same time. He's had many other injuries, from what I've read (broken jaw, broken thumb, separated shoulder, something with his hip). I haven't seen any immediate-post-injury photos of him, but I'd wager that I'd be pretty upset if I ever did. The bumps and bruises I don't mind--that's inherent to the sport, after all--but please, keep them minor. And nowhere near the face.
Coincidentally, the Capitals bowed out in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. To the Lightning. Hmmm.
Now, after all of this has transpired, I have two profiles saved on NHL 11. I thought, well, why not entertain yourself by alternating between RJ08 and mperreault in the "Be a Pro" mode, and send them through their respective seasons? With hockey season being officially over, now it's all about free agent transactions. I've read up on restricted and non-restricted free agency; I looked up "hip pointer" because I wasn't sure what that was. I've been all over the place; a video game is the best way to spend several mindless hours in front of the television and then just walk away. But oh, no. This is no Blades of Steel.
In Blades of Steel, you had a nameless, pretty much faceless team. They came out to the same jaunty Konami ditty every time; the screens on the fake Jumbotron were the same between periods regardless of where you played. To check someone, you simply ran into them while mashing the B button. If you got lucky, they'd fall over with an exclamation--the same exclamation you would make when accidentally running into the goalie before getting a shot off on the opposite end. You had to be everyone, including the goalie. I hated being the goalie. The side-to-side perspective did little for my depth perception. It took a while, but I won the championship. Really, I did it just for the faux newspaper snapshot of the celebrating team at the end of each game. Oh, and I was Minnesota, purple and white. I did it for the colors.
NHL 11 is scarier. The players look like real people. RJ08 and mperreault don't look like themselves, but they have faces, they interact with their teammates, and they don't enjoy getting hit with a slap shot or brutally cross-checked in front of the net. I feel guilty when they react. I cheer them on when they're in need of encouragement. I throw my hands up in the air when either of them scores a goal. RJ08 is further along in the season and leading the Kings with his plus-minus rating. I have nicknames for all of his teammates, many of whom aren't even on the Kings anymore, because you're stuck with the team as it was when the game went to press. Fair enough; I don't know most of the Capitals mperreault is teamed with, either. (Let's just say that the NHL is a really fluid league.) Last night RJ08 had two two-goal games, not bad for a defenseman; Frodo and Kopi kept getting him the puck. After two hours of that, I introduced mperreault to the pre-season ice. He had the game-winning goal in overtime against the Thrashers--oh excuse me, I mean the Winnipeg Jets--and had two goals against the Jones-less Lightning. I played for nearly five hours. I didn't care about sleep; I wanted to spend quality time with my pros.
What, then, is my point? Well. I could've summed it all up in one Faulknerian paragraph, but that wouldn't have been as fun as rambling endlessly up to this very sentence.
This blog is about how a veteran defenseman and a young upstart center do battle in my mind and in my heart. One blew me away on first sight, and that's all that I have to go on; the other scratched and clawed his way back into my thoughts, little by little. Are they even single? I bet the Playboy reader is. Will I go to NHL and/or AHL games next season with clever signs to support them? Damn right. If they meet on the ice, will I cringe as they crash into the boards together? Absolutely.
Am I being creepy? Nah, just honest. I believe in fate and karma; I'm not sold on the "it's just a coincidence" approach. If, in the end, all that happens is that I go to a lot of games and have a great time, so be it. Hockey rules, and I'm okay with that.
