You don't know until you know

Wednesday1/1/26

I've had a single New Year's Eve in my life that I consider special or memorable. I was a young boy and my parents had gone out for the night. I don't know what I did, but I must have gotten at least a little sneaky because I stayed up later than I should have, without the person in charge of us kids being aware.

I was in my parents' bedroom, watching the Bruins play the Canucks out in Vancouver. The Bruins had Barry Pederson at his best before he got injured and fell off, Rick Middleton at his best, too, and Ray Bourque doing his thing as the great Ray Bourque. The Canucks had those uniforms, and if you know hockey history at all, you know what I mean.

It was a barn burner of a game way out west. High-scoring affair. And it seemed to be taking a while, too, such that it went past midnight--or it does in my memory, anyway. I felt safe and excited and just in on something really cool in this personalized way that had other people--like the announcers (the great Fred Cusick, for one)--as a part of it.

That's my favorite New Year's Eve to date. I think it could only be matched or topped by a first New Year's Eve back in Rockport, if that ever happens.

The Buffalo Sabres have won ten in a row. Unclear where this has come from. I enjoyed the Sabres in the 1980s because they had all these stars--a bunch of whom went on to make the Hall of Fame--and it seemed like they were good but they weren't that good actually and the Bruins usually beat them and you'd think, "That was a solid win against a tough division foe," but I'm unsure if it ever really was.

Probably not. They also had the smaller ice surface, though, and cool players. Phil Housley epitomized the Sabres paradox, you might say. A future Hall of Famer, so a very good player, but also a player it was hard to win with in some ways.

Didn't expect Miami to cave in Ohio State like that. I think the Buckeyes would have been my pick to win it all. You don't know until you know.

The SEC has had a poor showing. I did watch about half of the Vanderbilt game yesterday. The ACC had been a punchline, so the Hurricanes win is a boost for the conference's credibility. Would like to see Indiana win the title. Then again, Alabama--who I didn't think should have made the tournament--can trip them up today. These bye teams seem to struggle, but we don't have much of a sample size yet either.

Patriots had two players in Stefon Diggs and Christian Barmore accused of domestic violence, with the reports coming out in the last couple of days. It's something else watching football fans not give a fuck about anything save if guys are in the line-up and help their team win. Innocent until proven guilty, I guess, which instead should be not guilty until proven guilty--innocence is something totally different in my book--but you see how little your average sports fan cares about, well, anyone, when stuff like this happens.

I turned on the sports radio station and this guy with the classic Boston idiot accent called in and began, "Yeah, I have a conspiracy theory..." regarding the two players above. What is wrong with you? People can't take anything seriously. It's all this video game for them. Nothing is real to them until reality pops them in the fucking mouth. Shit lands squarely in their lives. Or it's their daughter. But the rest of the time? It's a cartoon that people feel like they can shut off and isn't out there in real life actually happening.

And again, who knows what went down or didn't. But you can't go around talking like this. People aren't able to be serious. They have no sense of decorum because to them it's as if it's all a part of a simulation. Like they're playing Legend of Zelda.

We aren't even alive. Save technically, I guess. People doing their "hot takes" even with things like domestic violence, or the possibility thereof. Such a sick fucking race.

But hey, is he gonna be eligible for the playoffs, because we really need him. The defense is already pretty thin.

Suggested game/experiment: Turn on sports radio and see how long it is before one of the hosts say, "At the end of the day..."

I bet you it happens in the first minute. Typically it's the first thirty seconds, and it's like a minor miracle if it takes five minutes. Listen, too, for how many times you hear "you know."

These people can scarcely talk. They're not insightful. They're not witty. They're not funny. They don't know sports now. They don't know sports history. They don't know how something now fits within a framework of that which has been and what that means. But they have these jobs. Why do they have these jobs? It's the same reason why George Saunders has fiction in The New Yorker and Joshua Cohen won a Pulitzer for fiction. Other things.

It's always other things in our world. It's never how good someone is at the thing they do. It's not even about not being horrible at it, or worse than just about anyone else, or actually anyone else, including the people who don't do that thing and aren't in that line of work.

Other things.

USA got it handed to them yesterday by Sweden at the World Juniors. Saw the roster for Canada's Olympic team. It's stacked. It'll be a surprise if they don't win the gold. Perhaps if they have issues in net. But there's no excuse for that team not to win. That's an all-time great type of team.

Connor McDavid might be the third best player on it. I know, he's leading the league in scoring now and may very well not relinquish that top spot, but I think MacKinnon and Makar are bigger difference makers.

Actually, to follow-up on those comments from Monday...Drake Maye can win the MVP award. Looked like it was Matthew Stafford's for a while. Maye was in the running...but to be the runner-up. Had his bad game against the Bills a few weeks ago and that looked to have sealed whatever remained of the deal for Stafford. Then Maye was outstanding on Sunday--a quasi-historical game--with his team now back to winning, and then Stafford--whose team is now losing--was bad on Monday Night Football.

As a collective result, Maye may now be the favorite. His team is in contention for the top seed in the conference with a division title already in hand and Stafford's team is in third place in its division. He had more interceptions than Maye had incompletions on Sunday. Things are going in a Drake Maye kind of way right now.

Why am I noting this? As a reminder--and maybe it's one to myself on some level--that things can change fast.

I wish the US and Canada played each other in the round robin portion of the World Juniors with a chance for meeting again in the knockout portion. I get that you have ten teams and a time issue, but that was always an intriguing aspect of something like the Canada Cup to me. You'd see Team Canada and the Soviet Union go at it early, before they met up later when it counted the most.

I liked that the teams were already familiar with each other. Sure, those players had played against each other a bunch over the years, just as the kids in the World Juniors tournament has, but it's still different when you just faced a team. There's no feeling out process, for one thing. Watch Game 2 of the 1987 Canada Cup final--it's the most intense hockey ever played right from the first whistle. That game is the closest hockey has ever gotten to being art.

The Bruins hadn't been able to buy two points of late, with the the season slipping away playoff-wise, and then they beat the Oilers in Edmonton last night 6-2. It was one of those games where you could have seen the Bruins being on the losing end of a 7-1 drubbing. If I was an Edmonton fan, I would never trust that team, despite their two big stars.

I was looking at Jeremy Swayman's numbers yesterday before the game. He was around thirtieth in the league in both goals against average and save percentage. He's just not very good. People have been talking about how much better he's been this year, but that's wrong. He's had less games where 5-1 late becomes 7-1 in the end.

I mean...okay. But the damage was already done and the final score was academic. But he was good last night. He can be good sometimes. He's not consistently good, though. Then again, can the same not be said of you? No, no, no--we're going to far. Apologies.

Dustin Pedroia will remain on the Hall of Fame ballot with at least five percent of the vote. I could have seen that going either way. I don't think he's a Hall of Famer. Hard to do with less than 2000 hits if you're not a catcher or didn't bunch together a number of outrageous elite years.

Carlos Beltran and Andrew Jones will get in this year. I think the latter is a terrible pick (the former is merely a boring one). Did nothing after his twenties, a strikeout machine, and overrated defensively, which is worth nothing because his defense makes up a sizable chunk of his candidacy. I thought he was overweight throughout his career and that slowed him down in the outfield. But he's getting in.

Sports fans are much likelier to be less educated than non-sports fans. You see this if you read everything like I do. I'll be reading the comments in a classical music forum and then the comments in an NFL forum and though the people in the former are also trending towards illiteracy, they're usually more literate than the sports fans who often don't have the language and grammar skills of a seven-year-old child.

An example? Most of the classical music people will know that you don't add an apostrophe in pluralizing a word. The NFL fans will write "our player's suck lol." They won't know how to spell basic words. Very few people have diverse interests. They're usually a type. A stereotype, you might even say. It's as if they exist to reinforce stereotypes.

Recently an editor asked me if something in a piece I wrote was a sports term. It made perfect sense. But people usually just pour themselves into a single small bucket--more like a test tube. And that's it. There's nothing else, they go no further.

What I don't understand is why you'd elect to be this way. It's so strange to me how people opt for--and insist on--limiting themselves.

You can kind of read through the classical music discussion, but it borders on the impossible to read a chain of comments written by sports fans. It's like cave people. Cave men writing with their dicks after rubbing some ash from the fire on them. Then you think about these people being parents. How well can that possibly go from an education standpoint? What chance does that child have to grow up to be any smarter or more polished?

A person is ultimately responsible for what they know--it's not on anyone else. No one ever taught me something. I taught me. But realistically speaking, people take their cues from the home. From where they started and with whom they started.

I think about these people--they're often men, but the women are no smarter or mature--and how it would go if their kid had a question about history, for example, or expressed interest in the arts, or wanted to talk about a book. That's a non-starter. There's nothing that parent could provide or do for that child. Well, not much.

You realize how little people have to say to each other, and just how little they have to say. Our heads are mostly empty. As to what's there--we lack the communication skills to formulate those thoughts and feelings into coherent sentences.

Honesty is also virtually non-existent in our society. People are now wired not to be themselves, but rather some performative, ultimately false version. You play a part, you lose who you are, such that you don't even know anymore. How do you get "you" back? How do you find yourself? You don't. The means aren't in place.

Look at what people do say: It's the same shit that everyone else says in the same verbal modules. Rent free in his head, didn't have that on my bingo card, I'll die on that hill, GOAT, slaps, banger, I'm here for it, etc.

So what do they do? They put on a game. Followed by another game. And another game. Because the games might as well be endless. There's one after another like never before. Then they just sit there with the game on. With each other. As the replacement for communication and connection. We choose to live such limited lives. Sports readily enables this way of being, which is actually a way of not being.