Part Four: So I Guess The Season Is About To Start Or Something

I've been told the '07-08 season for the Vancouver Canucks is beginning this Wednesday, and that the first game of the season (well, Vancouver's at least) is going to be the Canucks vs. the Philadelphia Flyers. Probably interesting news for a fan, but seeing as I'm not one I'm not going to be talking about that. But I am going to go on a little bit of a Philadelphia Flyers-related tangent, because I think it's relevant to fleshing out the Non-Fan's backstory and explaining why exactly I don't like hockey that much. Or maybe it isn't and I just like telling stupid stories. Either way, here it is.

When I was a great deal younger, I was massively into the NHL. I played the videogames, I watched the games on TV, I wore a jersey from time to time (I actually had two - one Pittsburgh Penguins because Mario Lemieux was the bomb, one Montreal Canadiens because I always liked their jersey), pretended I was a hockey player whenever I went to an ice rink and generally did just about everything hockey-related aside from actually playing it. (Before anyone asks, I didn't play because I liked being the goalie but, due to my utter wimpiness, I sorta kinda broke down and cried whenever anyone scored on me. And seeing as how I was a bloody terrible goalie, this happened a lot.) Now, around this time Kraft had a promotion going on with sports card manufacturer Pinnacle, where on the back of boxes of Kraft Dinner they had cut-out 'hockey cards' profiling various Olympic-bound NHL players. Luckily for me, it was also around this time that my mother had a Costco membership - and, due to overwhelming demand (my sister loved Kraft Dinner like nothing else and I wanted these 'cards' really, really badly for a reason I can't quite recall at the moment) she purchased many a flat of Kraft Dinner cartons from there. You know the ones, something like 40 boxes to one flat for about as much as it'd cost to get two of the individual boxes from Safeway? Yeah, anyhow, thanks to that I was probably able to get the full set of these Pinnacle/Kraft Dinner Olympic hockey cards. And, yes, Mario Lemieux was on one of them. Guy was the bomb, I tell ya.

Getting back on track, after playing around with my cut-out pieces of cardboard crack (seriously, if you've never experienced the joy of cutting out the back of a macaroni box and being rewarded with Steve Yzerman's life story you've really been missing out) for god knows how long I decided that I needed something stronger, as it was. It was at this point that I discovered the local dollar store had packs of hockey cards from 1992, packs of something like 20 cards priced at the ridiculously affordable rate of 2 for $1.00. Now, while admittedly I was skeptical about whether or not these cards from 1992 would be as good as the aforementioned Kraft dinner ones in terms of sheer bang-for-mother's-buck because half the players wouldn't even be on the same teams anymore, most of the jerseys would be out-of-date and stats would just be all kinds of utterly useless, all that changed when I opened the first pack. I couldn't believe I ever doubted these beautiful, beautiful pieces of stiff paper - on the front of each card, a glossy photo of an NHL player! With his name next to it! And on the back, his stats which I never understood back then and still don't! With his bio below them! In retrospect these cards sound terribly dull and I haven't the faintest clue why I thought they were such hot stuff, but one thing I definitely do remember was my feeling of pure joy when I discovered, amongst all the players I didn't care about in my second pack, an Eric Lindros rookie card! Eric freakin' Lindros! Now, keep in mind as you're reading this that I don't know if Eric Lindros actually is any good as a player, if he's still in the league or anything like that. I just know that, at the time, getting an Eric Lindros rookie card was sort of like having the best day of your life, and then at the end of that day you realize it's your birthday so everyone you know starts giving you presents and when you open your presents they're all exactly what you want them to be.

Over the course of my hockey card-collecting years (I think I was 12 or so when I stopped for whatever reason) I ended up with about 4 Eric Lindros rookie cards so the novelty value of having one pretty much died off completely, but whenever I see that Philadelphia Flyers logo (which if you ask me looks kind of like an enemy from a Super Mario Bros. game) I go back to my young self exploding with glee upon pulling out that beautiful, beautiful Eric Lindros rookie card. With a glossy photo of him on the front and his bio on the back. It may not sound like much now, but to a kid like me that was all it took to make my day.

And now back to the Canucks. See, it's weird. I loved the Canucks because they were our home team and you're supposed to love your home team, but after Pavel Bure got his ass traded to Florida there was never really any player on the team I looked up to the way I looked up to guys like Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman, Brendan Shanahan or any of those other guys from the Kraft Dinner cards. And even now, I look at the roster and I just see a bunch of names and numbers, guys that get paid more money than I'll see in my life to chase a puck across an ice rink for a season or so. It's depressing, and that's a main factor leading to how, even while the rest of the city is eagerly readying their "GO CANUCKS GO" flags, I just can't get into it. We're not going to win the cup this year, we're not going to win it next year, we'll never win a game against the Ducks at this rate and our logo reminds people of a porpoise with hemorrhoids. We might suck less than the Phoenix Coyotes, but that doesn't mean much when the spirit's gone.

(Note: Next entry going to be less manic-depressive. Hopefully.)