This has become meditative: Hockey in the freshman dorm and other sports matters

Wednesday 2/4/26

I may not have written it here, but I erred conversationally in remarking to someone that Hockey East didn't have any teams in the top ten and there it was, late January. Providence was actually ranked ninth. I don't normally make mistakes like that. Wanted to get it right.

Providence has moved up to seven this week, with Boston College sitting right outside the top ten at eleven, followed by UConn at twelve. A professor pal of mine in Maine thinks Providence can be a threat in the tournament as they're hard to play against, and I can see where he's coming from.

BC downed Harvard Monday night 5-1 in the Beanpot opener, with BU taking out Northeastern in the nightcap in a shootout, setting up the semi-inevitable Eagles-Terriers final next Monday night. My pal and I both thought Harvard could knock off BC. The Crimson controlled the play early, but a goalie makes some stops, his team pots one, and it can roll on from there, which is what happened.

The shootout is anathema to me. I understand--I guess--ending normal regular season games that way, but the shootout isn't a true hockey outcome, and a special in-season tournament like the Beanpot ought to be decided five-on-five in OT, as long as it takes. And it was until recently, when the NCAA decided that there can't be a special provision for what are technically regular season games.

Come on. Understand the feel of the thing. The history. What it means locally. To a region. Don't cheapen it. No hockey player feels that a shootout is indicative of much of anything. Okay, but they also don't think some crazy bounce is indicative of anything either, you might say. Well, that's hockey! The shootout isn't.

It's hard to ever like BC over BU in this tournament. BC just beat BU the other night at the latter's barn, and BU is having a down year, especially given that they were ranked second in the country at season's start. I've said this before, but if you are one of these teams and you want to do something in a given year, you need to win the Beanpot that year. It does matter. The tournament as springboard, tone-setter.

Personally, I love the Beanpot. As I said earlier, I like winter, I like January, February, the cold, the appeal to heartiness, and this tournament is like a winter's celebration, hockey style, on the first and second Mondays of February. I like how that doesn't change, too.

Perhaps if I work hard and well enough I'll see if there's a cheap ticket available same-day for the championship on Monday. Sometimes people are just unloading something then. That's how I was able to see Radiohead on back-to-back days in 2018, but I feel like that wouldn't happen now, because things like this aren't treated as experiences but rather commodities that you boast about "having" on social media.

It's like that Oasis tour where they just did a mail-it-in nostalgia thing. People who never cared about that band wanted to go so that they could say they did. It passes as this weird kind of status symbol in an increasingly joyless world.

My disdain for Charlie McAvoy and his game is amply tabulated in these pages, but to be fair, his offensive game has been better than ever of late. He's showing up consistently on the score sheet and can get over 60 points this year for the first time in his career. They need that production.

The Bruins blew a four-goal lead Sunday, which you never want to see and never should see, but to be positive: They got a point against a tough team, they've been on a good run, and picking up a point helps pad that out further. They've been a big surprise this year.

I'm not big on cosmetic stuff, but I did think it was cool how the Bruins showed up Sunday for that outdoor game all wearing colonial gear. I've always thought it was cool when one local team supports another, or like in high school when the members of one squad show up in the bleachers to watch another team from the school play.

These outdoor games aren't for me, though. They're for non-hockey fans who wouldn't normally watch a hockey game, but like most things, they've been done to death. You can't keep track of them anymore. Or I can't, anyway. Or I don't bother, maybe I should say. I also think they look bad on TV. The camera angles and distances are all off. Then there is the question of the ice quality. I simply hope the Bruins win when they play in one of these affairs, but my interest doesn't go much beyond that.

You know what I liked as a hockey fan? Being in my freshman dorm room on a Saturday afternoon, doing some work--which for me meant doing writing that I wasn't assigned by the professors I had no respect for--while the Cam Neely/Ray Bourque Bruins took on, say, the Flyers, with Fred Cusick calling the game. I recall Neely getting a hat trick in one such game and then me and my roommate would play Dookie or Hot Rocks 1964-1971 and that's the kind of thing I might call to mind if I think about college.

The rest of it is probably post college things that have happened at the same place for very different reasons. Running stairs at BC during COVID because the Monument was closed for multiple years. Walking all the way to BC. Going to a football game by myself and reading a William Sloane novel between plays at the top of an end zone deck. You know, the things I have done to try to keep myself going and here, so that I can create. Keep trying by creating and not going away. This has become meditative. Even these sports entries in these pages tend to do that.

The Bruins can really put the hurt on the Florida Panthers tonight. The Bruins are presently in that second Wild Card spot with 68 points. Florida is hanging in the playoff picture right now with 59 points. The Bruins have a game in hand. The Panthers are in trouble. The two-time defending Stanley Cup champions may not have the chance to defend their title in the playoffs. If the Bruins beat them tonight, they'll have an eleven-point lead over Florida. That's a lot for early February. That may be too much to overcome. Has a two-time defending Stanley Cup champion ever not made the playoffs? I can't think of a team that has done that right now.

New England certainly has Patriots fever again. It's a little different this time around than during the Brady years, when Super Bowl appearances were practically de rigueur. This is more like how it was with the 1985 Patriots.

Pretty good comparable for Sam Darnold: Phil Simms. Solid to very good.

Let's say the Patriots win the Super Bowl. Is Josh McDaniels a Hall of Famer? I know, non-head coaches don't get it. So we're kind of doing a double hypothetical here. I still think it's an interesting idea to ponder. To do it with Brady is one thing, but then win it all with a twenty-three-year-old quarterback after Brady and a whole new set of offensive personnel?

As I wrote, I don't think the Patriots will win, though of course I hope they do, and I could see them winning. Sometimes when you have a year in which everything goes your way, it stays true until the last. I also think that Mike Vrabel will have his team well-prepared in terms of strategy and psychologically. They'll be ready to go. My feeling is that Drake Maye will need a big game, and I'm not sure he's capable of that kind of game right now in his career, let alone on this stage, and if he's injured to boot.

I don't think like any fans do. I never do, with anything. Most fans don't think. So there's that. They are usually incapable of assessing anything sans partiality, they don't know history, they often have no clue what they're even seeing, and now, more than ever, they do this creepy, baleful parasocial thing that speaks to poor mental health, an lack of a self and an identity of their own, purpose in their own lives, to say nothing of achievement, etc.

They usually go way overboard, but they also go, if you will, "underboard." It's because they all think alike and take their cues from the pack. In other words, they don't actually think. They parrot, amplify, parrot some more, pile on, add to the echoes, and then you just get this big ear-assaulting din.

Take, for instance, the Celtics. They're doing very well. As I said before the season started, there was no reason why this team, even minus Jayson Tatum, couldn't come out of the East if they made a point of trying to do so. That is, went for it, rather than chalked this up as a lost year, bridge year, fallow year, whatever you wish to call it.

Was scanning through the comments in a forum of Celtics fans, and to a person they all said there was no way the team could win a championship this year. I don't know that. I see a team that can come out of the East and has as good a shot as anyone in that conference to do so. That would be reasonable. You make the Finals, and sure, you probably lose to OKC or whoever from the West, but you get to the Finals and you have something of a shot. You are there. You're one of the last two teams standing.

The average football fan is less intelligent than the average baseball fan by a wide margin. With football fans, it's almost entirely about the "now," because they're usually not smart enough to remember anything from even recent history. Last year, two years ago, five years ago.

They have no interest in the history of their sport. That which they profess in the here and now to care so much about is forgotten soon enough. It's like this food item--a junk food--with the shelf life of a day. The day it's put on the shelf is the same as the "Sell by" day. Stuff that face. Sit on that couch. Shut off that brain. Bad brain!

The average American football fan measures what "their" team does through the prism of their own life. That is, the team's victory is a part of their life, like it's their achievement and they call it to mind as such. Which is unhealthy, of course.

A team's achievement isn't yours, but people for the most part don't achieve anything in their lives and scarcely try to; less so as we go along. Avarice exists. Selfishness. But not the questing spirit of achieving, which is also to risk failing to achieve. People aren't strong enough to strive, they won't bother if the outcome isn't all but a gimme, and they're too lazy. Too lazy to try once, never mind keep trying. Try a different way.

Trying also takes some degree of courage, and people are usually cowards. This world and its ways functions as a coward factory. Screens and hiding behind them, group think, attention whoring through insincerity, constant faking, constant fuckery, being a member of a group, no matter how rancid the group, how soulless the group, how phony the group, rather than a person/yourself. Courage is an individual thing. It's a you thing. And when you don't have a you, well, how would you even start to be brave? It's like trying to run with your feet in the air.

They don't have standards for themselves. They act like they have standards for the world, as in society and their communities, but the person who actually does have those standards and an intelligent understanding of what the minimum expectations should be, knows that you have to start with you. Those standards must be met in you, those expectations fulfilled. What you mostly get instead is lip service. Attention seeking. Performative griping. And hypocrisy.

Any "all-time" football discussion will range no further back chronologically than the ages of the people involved as those past players and teams pertained to their personal lives. If someone with knowledge "enters the chat," as people say now, that person will be unwelcome, because their knowledge is unwelcome around this kind of person who really knows nothing.

Knowledge is a threat in our world. It's treated like poison. An assassin of ego. Precious, fragile ego. That house of cards rather than the house of brick. That ego is flimsy because it's not based in and built up from the real. You don't want to have an ego anyway; you want to know who you are. These are different things. People like to think that it's a threat to corrupt leaders, but it's a threat to them, too. And there are far more of them than there are corrupt leaders. That it is such a threat to them enables the corrupt leaders. Makes it that much easier to be a corrupt leader.

But people don't see this. They don't have that level of self-awareness. No one wants to think something about themselves that they'd have to change in themselves. Especially if that awareness would cause them to feel worse about themselves. It's like getting your ass kicked in a game and denying the scoreboard, because it makes you feel bad.

Only, in this case, you're the one crushing yourself. You're playing against air--there is no other team--and you're getting crushed. But the game isn't over. Tides turn. Momentum reverses. The sports analogy as life, which is ultimately how sports are most useful. But this is lost on nearly everyone who "consumes" sports, and I think that's the correct word now.

The group tries to silence and shun the person with knowledge by shaming them. Saying that today's athletes would obliterate (I could have chosen a better word; the average NFL fan in some flyover state won't even know such a simple word) those on the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers or whatever.

It's fear and insecurity. Ignorant people are terrified of those who possess real knowledge, because they latter, in the minds of the ignorant, carries with them the necessary tools to "out" and embarrass them. Reveal them as imposters.

I put on Felger and Maz here in Boston the other day for like three minutes. It's brutal, brutal, brutal listening. You will not go ten seconds before you get the bathroom imagery and are hit upside the head with four usages of the phrase "at the end of the day" and Felger howling like some desperate, dishonest, attention-starved monkey (who sounds like this netherworld cross between a shrill, spoiled, middle school princess and a jowly slob who licks his fingers while he's eating like that's where the best part of the meal is, right there in the old, sweaty epidermis by the fingernails with the dirt under them). They do the shame thing because they themselves are so stupid, and yet, depressingly, much smarter than the average fan.

Felger said if you didn't see a team when you were at least twelve-years-old, then you didn't have any right to talk about how good they were, because you weren't there. This is a form of gatekeeping that many "old timers" have always tried to do. I categorically rejected it when I was six-years-old, because I knew better.

From that early age, I studied the numbers, read the accounts, the histories, the memoirs. Later this included more sophisticated numbers--the internet opened up a lot--and vintage articles. So, yes, I can talk expertly about the 1930 Philadelphia Athletics, and I certainly wasn't there.

We treat knowledge like it's this bad thing. And you're bad for having it. You're at fault, you should be left out. You're doing it all wrong, and the stupid howler monkey is doing it right. The howler monkeys have all the numbers on their side (not the stats; I mean the numbers of the group, the majority).

If you're an intelligent person, chances are you're the only one in a discussion forum, a neighborhood, a school, what have you. You're the minority in the extreme. You're not welcome among the howler monkeys. They see you as a threat, as the person who makes a bust when they're trying to get away with something--constant faking. And these people are so simple and so stupid that they act like saying the word "literally" four times a sentence makes them right four times over.

You'll find virtually no intelligent football history talk. You can find some intelligent baseball history talk, and even some intelligent hockey history talk--mostly thanks to Canadians. Basketball history talk also doesn't exist. Someone like my nephew hates to read. It's sad. He just won't read. Nothing. He likes sports, but he doesn't care about sports beyond the here-today-gone-tomorrow aspect and doing his fantasy league with his friends. It goes no further, though. He wouldn't look at any stats beyond that, he has no curiosity as to the great teams and players. Developments, innovations. Nothing.

I ran out of books to read in the available spaces on the topic of sports (and many others) when I was a kid. I blew through those kid libraries. Then I kept looking for more and more. I could tell you so much from a box score in the paper at seven-years-old. I knew exactly the type of game it was, the flow, the moves, the strategies, the hunches that were played, if I hadn't seen the game, as was often the case.

You had the one game, if that, on TV, there weren't endless highlight packages, obviously no social media. You had to use your brain, use your imagination. Put things together. You had to...gulp...think. Make connections. Reason.

This adds up. Doing this leads into being like this, and when you're like something, you're not like something over here and not like yourself over there. The human brain worked better. Now its screens and mental passivity to the point of mental inertia. Think of the healthy brain like the healthy person running stairs in the Monument. Light on its feet, so to speak.

The inert brain is like some congealed mass on the sidewalk. The only things it accumulates are the dirt, dog piss, and discarded cigarette butts that stick to its surface.

Then you're someone who knows nothing, can't think, says "literally" 200 times a day, says "We're so back!" about the team you're definitely not on and have nothing to do with, working the parasocial angle, and living a life of no consequence and offering nothing to others and one's self.

But go team and so and so is literally the GOAT.